Well I’m ashamed to admit it but my career as a habitual shoplifter never really got off the ground, or even down the aisle. That doesn’t mean that I no longer need to steal things; while I now earn approximately sixteen times what I got paid for teaching English in Madrid, I’d be horrified to think that I’d reached the peak of my earning potential.
My short-lived interest in retail thievery was inevitably inspired more by political sentiment than by any deep-rooted criminal instincts. What the good people at yomango get up to is of course entirely laudable, and I was quite excited to read in the Guardian about the activities of ‘Germany's real-life Robin Hood gang’, who have taken to charging en masse into luxury goods stores, taking whatever they like and then distributing it among ‘Germany’s new underclass’:
… interns who worked for months in glamorous publishing houses without being paid, low-wage nursery assistants, mums forced to take part-time jobs as cleaning ladies and "one-euro jobbers", performing menial tasks under a German government welfare scheme. The gang said it didn't merely object to capitalism. Instead it was making a stand against Prekarisierung or "precariousness" - the uncertainty facing 20- and lower 30somethings as they try to navigate their way through Europe's gloomy neo-liberal jobs market.
Although I’ve fortunately never been a victim of it myself, I’ve long found it nauseating that young graduates are often expected to work for a year or more for nichts in the hope that there may at the end of it be a professional job which will afford them the lifestyle which their parents took for granted:
”We are talking about young, relatively well-educated people whose parents easily attained secure jobs and middle-class status. The situation now is far more insecure. For the first time in many generations, young people in Europe have bleaker prospects than their parents did. They are not as optimistic or utopian as people were in the 60s, or as pessimistic and depressed as they were in the 80s. Instead they find themselves having to walk a tightrope.”
If they aren’t working for free, a lot of highly qualified young people are working for casi nada. An article in El País last year highlighted the ‘La generación de los mil euros’, graduates in their late twenties and early thirties who may have diplomas coming out of their culos and speak various foreign languages but just can’t find a job which pays more than a thousand euros a month and who are stuck paying more than a third of their income on rent, living grudgingly in shared apartments, with no savings and no chance of buying a house or sustaining a family, living a hand-to-mouth existence and gradually ‘realising that the future is not where they believed it to be’. ( Read more... )
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Since I started this blog visitor tracking lark about, ooh, 12 hours ago, I have had no visitors from any of the white countries above, so if you're reading this in Africa, Mexico, Mongolia, the Middle East including Turkey or what I take to be Greenland, I'd like to extend a very special welcome, and point out that, a lot of the time, I simply don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
In other news, I did finally get round to stealing a tomato the other day. Not exactly top-notch criminal behaviour, of course, but it was quite a large tomato, and I helped myself to it via what I thought was the tried and tested method of sticking three or four tomatoes in a bag, weighing it and sticking on the, er, sticker and then adding a couple more for good measure. It turns out, after consulting several of my peers, that this is not quite as common as I'd always thought it was, but I should stress that I have still not, as of the time of writing, been fed to the crocodiles or hanged.
So give it a try. I'd imagine, although I can't say for certain, that it also works with either bananas, sweet potatos or plums.
(Incidentally, I'm aware that Africa is not normally thought of as the White Continent, and that it's odd to refer to Greenland as white, except obviously in the very important sense that, although I've admittedly never been there to see for myself, it is said to snow a fuck of a lot.)
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For anyone who thinks that this blog should probably have something to do with teaching, like I do, here is a lesson plan I made up in my head while I was 'Just Sitting There' thinking hard about shoplifting and what the hell I'm gonna do tomorrow in class...
Shoplifting Lesson
Show students something you can claim to have stolen - bananas or Ipods work wonders. Ask them how much they think it cost. Tell them you it didn't cost you anything, and try to convince them that you nicked it.
Say 'No, haha, of course it's not stolen' and show them the receipt ('ask for 'un recibo, por favor'' (Time Out Madrid, 2002)) (unless of course you did steal it, that is, in which case Hey hey!, well done, I'm jealous).
See if they know any other words for 'steal' - teach them nick, swipe and 'five-fingered discount'. Elicit Shoplifting.
Ask them if they've ever taken anything from a shop without paying. If no, tell them you understand they might be shy, and put them in groups to 'share their secrets'.
In pairs or threes or whatever, give them the following questions to discuss:
Have you ever stolen anything from a shop?
Do you know anybody else who shoplifts regularly?
Would you ever nick anything from a shop? If so, under what circumstances?
Get feedback on questions - get one in each group to 'report' back and try to find some way of getting the others to contribute instead of just staring at you when you're not the one talking.
Have a quick vote on who thinks it's right or wrong to shoplift. If you have someone who is opposed to it under any circumstances whatsoever, try not to spit on them as you put them in the same group with the one who you most suspect of having a criminal record. Or alternatively, stick them in a pair with the one who hardly ever....says..............any........................
thing.
Give them the following questions:
Do you think it's right or wrong to shoplift? Why/why not?
Is stealing from local shops the same as stealing from supermarkets? Why/why not?
Do you know anyone who's ever get caught shoplifting? Did you feel sorry for them?
See if anyone knows about the €350 thing. Briefly ask them what they could steal 'for' €350. Tell them that all the things they've mentioned are basically free if you're prepared to maybe lose face a little in your local community.
Tell them they're going to practice their shoplifting skills. Because they're just practising, they will have to take it in turns to be the thief and the shop assistant, or if you have or prefer threes, the third one can be the manager.
EITHER tell them you didn't have time to prepare properly, and hand them some post-it notes so they can write role-cards for the other pairs. Remind them that you want to practice as realistically as possible, so they should think of a variety of people in different shopping places - supermarkets, chinese shops, newspaper & porn kiosks, off-licenses, the fucking Body Shop, and so on.
Get down into your Tefl Crouch and help them write their role-cards.
OR alternatively you could use these ones I made earlier.
Swap round the role-cards and tell them to get practicing...
..and then all you have to do is wander round giggling and waiting for the bell to ring, which, what with my appalling sense of .... timing, should have been about 35-40 minutes ago.
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Any readers concerned that my ongoing fascination with China is turning into an unhealthy and vindictive obsession might be relieved to hear that I've developed a new interest, and potentially a whole new hobby: Shoplifting. It came about because I have a student who works for a company which sells supposedly theft-proof security products to supermarkets - coded labels, advanced bar code technology, those almost totally irritating roundy plastic things they stick on bottles of spirits and the like - and who, in the course of a discussion of which Spanish supermarkets are easiest to nick things from (clue: it's not El Corte Ingles), revealed himself to be something of an unreformed pilferer himself, claiming to have surrepticiously slipped thousands of products out of hundreds of supermarkets over the years.
It's an aspect of life that I've never really considered, apart from a vaguely rebellious notion that there is absolutely nothing wrong with swiping whatever takes your fancy from the shelves of Tescos or Sainsbury's or wherever. I'm even quite shocked when I leave a shop with someone who turns out to have helped themselves to a five-fingered discount. And the shocking and shameful truth, which it took quite a lot of courage and soul-searching to even admit to myself, is that I don't think I have ever stolen anything from a shop in my life.
It's certainly not been through a lack of necessity. I don't have any problem with pathetically informing the person at the checkout that I'll have to leave three of those eleven bananas and that 99 cents Neal Diamond - Live! cd behind. And in my mind I've always known that the risks of being challenged, let alone taken away and fed to the crocodiles, are almost non-existent - according to my Shoplifting Guru, the police never even bother going to the store if the value of what you've stuffed down your pants/hidden behind your earlobe/stashed inside the baby is less than €350. This article talks in some detail about quite how much fun and how widespread it is: I've obviously been missing out bigtime. Maybe I am all the same just a coward, but I can honestly say that when I'm counting my farthings in Dia or Lidl (of course, it's not great for your social standing to be caught in the act in those 12p-for-a-can-of-beans supermakets, no matter how famous you might be), the thought of shoplifting never ever occurs to me. The only conclusion is that I forget to steal things.
So I decided to turn over a new leaf, and start helping myself to at least one item per visit to the Super. If I get good enough at it in my usual discount haunts, I thought, I reckon in a year or so I'll have saved enough to upgrade to a weekly visit to El Cortin. Not that I'd be paying for it, of course. But then I reconsidered - I have, I realised, much nearer to my house, my own ready made Shoplifting Academy.
Just next to my building, right at the entrance to the local metro station is one of Madrid's 400,000 Chinese shops, and the two kids who staff it are by far and away the doziest people I've ever encountered in my life. They speak notverymuch Spanish, don't despite my very best vocal contortions appear to understand a word of Chinese, and my attempts to communicate with them in English were greeted with stares as blank as something totally, like totally, like one hundred percent blank. Plus, they seem to spend their non-serving moments hidden away somewhere beneath the counter. I think maybe it's a better choice if I want a not-too-challenging initiation into the montaña rusa world of the habitual shoplifter.
So that's where I'll be starting off my criminal career. I know it's not the most ethical option to start by picking on low-down neighbourhood establishments owned and staffed by recent immigrants, not to mention ones that are quite so badly-stocked and lacking in pesto. But bear with me, it is only a beginning, and before too long I'll be setting my sights on the true temples of modern consumer capitalism and rampantly stuffing my pockets in an adrenaline-fuelled frenzy of premium product theft. That is, of course, if I'm not making a shame-faced extended detour to a different metro station every day for the next two years...
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