Omni, nobody was shoplifting at Zingerman's becasue they were hungry and poor.
They were wealthy professionals with a problem, or just greedy. Several of them took advantage of the "sure, you can have a shopping bag to carry your groceries in before you've paid for them" policy.
Or, they were likely addicts trying to take advantage of the "you don't need a reciept to return your item" policy. Before we started requiring reciepts for returns, people would come in on really busy days so nobody would notice them take the $60 bottle of olive oil off the shelf that they would then go up to the register and "return" for cash. Somebody even tried to circumvent the policy by photocopying a reciept.
We all deeply resented these people. We worked really hard and here come these people taking advantage of our kindness and trust and bending us over and screwing us. It made us look at all of our customers more suspiciously, and I really hated that.
To make things even worse, Zingerman's does a huge amount of work to feed the hungry and help disadvantaged kids and people in recovery in its community, so much so that its efforts were
recently recognized on a national level.