Jane’s Addiction: “I’ve been caught stealing. Once when I was 5”.
Did anyone else shoplift when they were kids? I stole a LOT and never got caught (I’m sure I’ve paid it back in karma tho?!).
A good school mate who lived in my area and I used to catch a bus into the city most weekends. We went so often, his parents thought we must have had girlfriends and that we were going in to the movies on dates every weekend. Little did they know that we were actually shoplifting.
We would both wear big coats and backpacks. You could very easily roll magazines into your arm sleeves. I had a jacket I wore under my coat that had zippers all over it (everything bought in Hong Kong on holidays had zippers all over it at the time!). I used to shove POSCA PENS in the zipper pockets (which were fake pockets that just dumped the pens into the jacket lining allowing me to carry a LOT of stuff).
We got more and more brazen and started to do some legitimate shoplifting. We would take a 10 pack of TDK blank cassette tapes from Woolworths on George Street and simply go down the escalator, with goods in hand, and exit via the QVB Exit. scot-free.
On one weekend we thought we’d head into Chinatown to lift. Big mistake as my mate’s tall, and white! The first shop we went into I loaded up, got out and crossed the road to wait for my mate to come out, but he was stopped. I saw him lift his arms and all these pens just fell out onto the street.
I never saw that mate again on weekends. I’m sure his parents busted his nuts. Didn’t stop me though, I just went on to new heights.
One weekend we got a crew together to check out this huge CD & LP sale at the Hordern Pavilion (The Hordern is where all the big rock and metal bands play in Sydney). We pooled our cash together and with it I bought a few hundred dollars worth of LP’s and CD’s, walked out, emptied the goods and walked back in with the receipt.
Any one of us could then walk in, get whatever CD’s and LP’s we wanted to so long as the value was the same as the original receipt. If security asked to see a receipt for the goods in hand you’d just produce the receipt we started out with earlier that day.
Porn mags were sold like crack cocaine in high school. I remember some of my guys throwing porno mags into the year 7’s playgrounds for free, only to hook them into buying new editions each month.
It wasn’t until my little sister got caught shoplifting that I stopped. Mum and Dad had gotten a call from a store to say they had my sister, and that she had been caught shoplifting. This hit my parents pretty damn hard as they themselves ran a retail store in Centrepoint Tower (now Sydney Tower). My little sis copped it pretty bad from Dad, so bad that I never ever wanted to have Dad that mad at me… so I quit!