Free The Steal by Rachel Shteir Page A

of their big “jaws,” these tags are removed from garments with a tool resembling a giant nutcracker.
    Some retailers acknowledged that shoplifting comprised a significant part of inventory losses, but many others remained skeptical that Assaf’s product would help. The decadelong shoplifting spike and the computer revolution (stores used them for inventory) finally helped push Sensormatic into profitability. “Stores began to let salespeople go and shoplifting skyrocketed. Almost out of desperation, stores decided to give EAS an opportunity,” Assaf said, adding that his first client, Macy’s, installed the tags in the fur department, but years passed before the store used them on designer and ready-to-wear clothing.
    Of the other basement inventors, garage engineers, and Saturday-afternoon entrepreneurs who created the antishoplifting technology industry, Peter Stern is typical. While Assaf and Minasy were tinkering with their tags, Stern, an engineer living outside Philadelphia who served as president of a branch of the local public library, asked the director about his problems. The director said: book stealers.
    Stern designed his own antishoplifting device—a refined metal detector that picked up signals from small slips of paper lined with a laminate of lightweight conductive metals such as aluminum. These were pasted on books’ flyleaves. Libraries at New York University, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania used this system.
    Albert “Ted” Wolf, a prominent local family’s scion who worked with Stern, became CEO of a new company founded by Stern dedicated to this technology, later called Checkpoint. Wolf set up headquarters in Barrington, New Jersey, and later, a little farther to the west in Thorofare. In 1974, the two men decided that the library market was too dull and switched to retail and to radio frequency tags. Soon Korvette’s, CVS, Walgreens, Urban Outfitters, and the U.S. Postal Service installed the tags Checkpoint manufactured.
    EAS drove shoplifters to find new ways to steal, such as using booster bags—shopping bags lined with metal to deflect the electronic technology. In one of the scaremongering articles about the shoplifting surge in this decade, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance announced, “Strengthened security and crackdowns don’t seem to help much.”

WHEN “STEALING THIS BOOK” WAS COOL
    Just when the technology began to boom, the counterculture introduced a new motive for shoplifting: the revolution. In 1970, a new generation of euphemisms for the crime came into vogue: “Five-finger discount,” “liberating,” and “ripping off.” The same year, two books endorsed the crime as one that belonged to the people: Do It: Scenarios of the Revolution and The Anarchist Cookbook . Jerry Rubin, a thirty-two-year-old yippie and hero at the trial of the Chicago Seven, wrote Do It . William Powell, nineteen, was responsible for the cookbook. Chapter 22 of Do It , titled “Money Is Shit—Burning Money, Looting and Shoplifting Can Get You High,” is not so much a how-to as a crude celebration of theft. The famous line comes after Rubin tells the story of destroying dollar bills with Abbie Hoffman at the New York Stock Exchange. But even that commemoration of American outlaw cheek fails to prepare readers for Rubin’s out-and-out endorsement of shoplifting as an exhilarating, revolutionary act: “All money represents theft . . . shoplifting gets you high. Don’t buy. Steal. If you act like it’s yours, no one will ask you to pay for it.” In “shoplifting gets you high,” the yippies found an anthem.
    In a chapter on electronics, sabotage, and surveillance, Powell lumps shoplifting in with other pranks such as tapping phones, squirting glue in keyholes at the Stock Exchange, and hot-wiring cars. Like Rubin, Powell makes out liberators to be more discriminating than common thieves: “The revolutionary will steal from large corporations and the common thief will steal