On Nectarines and Shoplifting
There are no fruit trees in New York. Instead, there’s a whole lot of Whole Foods. They’re just as easy to steal from, but the spoils are quite a bit less fresh.
My favorite Whole Foods to shoplift from is the one on Hudson Yards, which has four different exits and only one check-out counter (making it easy to grab my goods and slip away). The workers there don’t care that I’m stuffing my pockets with nectarines. They notice it, sure, but aren’t paid enough to do much more.
(A friend who works for Amazon recently asked me to “please, don’t put this story in your Substack. Whole Foods is, like, technically my boss.” And, he implied: it’s embarrassing enough as it is to be affiliated with you, you hippy, wannabe leftist!)
Similarly, my boyfriend, who’s kind of an overgrown boy scout, is both amused and disturbed by my shoplifting habits. I think it may have seemed sexy at the start of our courtship, when it was just another feature of my Manic Pixie Dream Girl aesthetic, but it quickly became un-sexy when he realized it’s more of an obsessive compulsive behavior. (More on that later).
When he invited me home on our second date, I joked, “Aren’t you worried that I might rob you in your sleep?”. To this, he replied, “Please. If you maimed and mugged me, I’d be honored.” That’s how I knew he found it sexy.
More recently, however, when he saw me unloading a tote bag’s worth of nectarines into the fridge, he looked distraught and dismayed. “Zoë…” he said, in that slow, cautious tone of a disappointed dog owner. It was as if he’d just found a pee stain on the floor, and was trying to scold me without getting bitten. “Zoë, what’s up with the stealing?”.
Not understanding the question, I replied, “Oh, don’t worry. It’s just Whole Foods.”
He scoffed. “That’s not what I meant.”
I looked at him, then, and saw that he was really quite upset that I’d stolen from a multi-billion dollar corporation. “Huh?” I said, still not understanding. “Are you mad at me?”
“I mean… no? It’s your life, your choices,” he replied, clearly trying to straddle the line between Good Samaritan and Woke Feminist. “But it’s not like you don’t have money. You could've easily just bought the nectarines.”
This is such a funny line of argument to me, if only because it’s so broadly applicable, yet narrowly applied. “It’s not like you don’t have money. You could’ve easily ____”
[Fill in the blank: given to mutual aid / bought a meal for someone hungry / helped pay a friend’s rent / donated to a cause / etc.].
And yet, most of the time, it’s used exclusively in relation to the things we do or don’t buy; as if the only debts between us are those racked and tallied by systems of consumerism.
Why is it that the act of not-buying (or “stealing”) fruit makes my unused money so hypervisible? Why aren’t we equally judgmental about people’s refusal to redistribute wealth that is, so often, unjustly gained through systems of exploitation? I’m just saying.
If you calculated all the money I’ve saved on my shoplifting escapades (which is quite a lot, given that I haven’t “paid” for $30 soap since high school), I bet it would still come out to be less than the amount I’ve given to mutual aid. Not that good leftism is necessarily about keeping score. I just want it to be known that, if it was, I should have a lot of points!
Granted, this is a very lofty, faux activist excuse for what is pretty easily recognizable as pathological kleptomania. Otherwise known as one of my many “rich girl flaws”! (Actually, Mina Le has a pretty great video essay on this, which I entirely recommend).
A list of other, less savory things I’ve stolen: an umbrella from a dorm room, a book from my friend’s apartment, and a scarf from my ex’s backpack. None of that can be justified, I think, through leftist rationale.
So, then, back to my boyfriend’s question: What’s up with the stealing?
In part, I think it’s an obvious symptom of my OCD, in which taking things just “feels right,” and leaving it be “feels wasteful.” I also think it probably stems from my obsession with numbers: mentally, I can’t help but calculate the monetary value of every item I steal ($20 for an umbrella, $100 for a cashmere scarf), and add it to the Savings list in my head. For someone who barely makes minimum wage, it’s rejuvenating to feel worth the price of expensive belongings!
But most of all, I think it has to do with the great dopamine thrill of accumulation. Like any other recovering capitalist, I’m often swayed by the satisfaction of material gain. In the colonial world in which we live, wherein one’s personhood is so indelibly tied to the amount of land or property they “own,” I can’t help that the act of taking, taking, taking, without ever paying, inevitably serves as both an assertion and extension of self.
As religion, class, and lineage have become increasingly obsolete in establishing one’s societal position, the possession of property has become one of the few means of asserting individual status. At least, according to Erich Fromm – a German psychoanalyst and holocaust refugee – who writes, of the 15th century, that:
[One’s] self was backed up by the possession of property. “He” as a person and the property he owned could not be separated. A man’s clothes or his house were parts of his self just as much as his body. The less he felt he was being somebody the more he needed to have possessions. If the individual had no property or lost it, he was lacking an important part of his “self” and to a certain extent was not considered to be a full-fledged person, either by others or by himself.
And I’m certainly not above this cheap attempt toward self-importance! If material possessions are what entitle me to the status of “a full-fledged person,” then you bet your ass that I’ll be filling my grubby little hands with things after things after things, all in some desperate drive to feel a semblance of control in this landscape of total chaos.
Obviously, I wish things were not this way. Politically, ethically, intellectually – I’m all for a world in which selfhood isn’t defined by property ownership. Honestly, hell to the concept of selfhood at all! Things have only gone downhill since we started thinking of ourselves as separate, self-contained individuals, like little avatars on the Monopoly board. When in truth, we should act like the porous, permeable beings we are, deeply intraconnected to each other and the ecosystems in which we live.1
Perhaps, once we do, there’ll be no more joy in stealing things. Our self-worth won’t be defined by the objects we own, but rather the collectives of which we’re a part; which form a greater Self than the singular body alone. Instead of cheap thrills, there will only be the slow, pleasant warmth of interhuman, interspecies interconnection.
Until then however, I plan to stay as shallow and selfish as everyone else. Nabbing soap from CVS. Lipstick from Sephora. My boyfriend’s rings from his jewelry drawer. And, of course, nectarines from Whole Foods.
More! I demand more!