Nonfiction by Randi Schalet
I slip a container of Fage yogurt into my canvas bag and wait, braced for the self-checkout machine to protest. It doesn’t. The silence feels like permission.
I ring up a few more groceries—a head of broccoli, oat milk—then drop in an unscanned item. Still nothing. A single clerk oversees eight registers. I’m short, white-haired, someone no one looks at twice. I call him over with a pointless question. When he steps away to help someone download their Prime code, I tuck in a bag of pancake mix. My heart doesn’t speed up. I’ve had too much practice.
The prepared foods are so overpriced, I’d never buy them without my own buy-one-get-one “discount.” I weigh one hot bar box, then stack it beneath a second heavier one—mac and cheese, rosemary potatoes, all butter and salt.
I leave with two overstuffed bags and a small receipt. Outside, I hand ten dollars to a man in red sneakers sitting in the parking lot. I unpack the food and eat at a shaded picnic table.
Money was the language of my family. It wasn’t only about having more, it was about getting it the clever way. Don’t work too hard. Don’t ask for approval. Smart people had money because they knew how to take it.
Before they divorced, my parents owned several discount clothing stores that eventually went under when the neighborhood changed.
In the first years, the Brooklyn store was crowded—people waiting in line for the makeshift dressing room, layaway tickets stacked at the counter. My father hated shoplifters and was obsessed with catching them. Once, from behind the jewelry case, he spotted a man slip something into his pocket. He jumped onto the case, shattered the glass beneath him, and chased the man down the block, blood streaming down his calf.
The register was set to charge ten percent tax, even though New York’s rate was seven. It bothered me. When he left me alone up front, I charged seven, running the seven-times table in my head. At night, the numbers kept repeating—7, 14, 21.
The clothes my father sold as new were actually “seconds”—ripped seams, crooked stitching. He bought them in bulk from Hasidic wholesalers in the garment district, their corkscrew peyos swinging as they argued. His yellow yarmulke, printed with another boy’s bar mitzvah, kept slipping off. The men would laugh, and I didn’t know if it was at the price or him. I sat on the concrete floor and watched.
He trucked the boxes to a small, wiry woman in a dark railroad flat who replaced broken zippers and missing buttons on her machine. She was paid by the piece. When we returned, she told him how much he owed, pointing at some numbers she’d scrawled on an envelope. He said it was too high, already pulling out his wallet. She shrugged and said that was the number. I leaned against the buzzing fridge.
I only got caught shoplifting once. I was in high school, meeting friends at a parking lot flea market. I walked past tables of things nobody needed—a segmented snake with a painted head, a two-foot sword with plastic rubies—and shoved both under my coat. I just wanted to take them. The sword was practically sticking out. When a security guard with a beer gut tapped my shoulder, I jumped.
“Unbutton your coat, young lady,” he said. The sword clattered to the ground. He shook his head and led me to a tiny office with a metal desk. “You need to call your mother. I’m not letting you go without a parent.”
I called a lesbian aunt who I hoped wouldn’t tell. She didn’t answer.
He shoved a yellow pad at me. “Write down your name and phone number.” I wrote our home number, assuming no one would pick up. It was Saturday—my father was at the store.
Fifteen minutes later, he burst in, shouting, an unlit cigar clamped in his mouth. He wasn’t mad at me; he was yelling at the guard. “How do you know she didn’t buy this stuff?”
Then he turned to me. “Did you pay for it?”
“Yes,” I lied instantly.
“Give it back to her,” he told the guard.
“Pick it up,” he said to me.
I clutched the things to my chest and walked beside him to the car. In the back seat, I waited for the explosion. Nothing. He dropped me at home like the errand was finished. I ran up to my room, shoved the loot behind my bed, and never looked at it again. I didn’t grow out of stealing; I just got better at it.
I’d always known my mother took small things, switching a belt from one coat to another, rearranging a top and bottom on a hanger so they went together. After the divorce, she bought things on sale in Macy’s, changed the tags at home, then returned them for more. We still had a price gun and tagger from the store. When she had Parkinson’s and was in a wheelchair, I took them home. In department store dressing rooms, I switched tags, the gun clicking once. I folded the old tags into tiny squares and dropped them behind the bench.
I think my father hated shoplifters because he saw himself in them. He just preferred to steal on the business side—no income tax, extra sales tax, and “new” clothes stitched together in a stranger’s kitchen.
In my childhood, taking was a skill, and I learned it. I get a bit of a buzz from my weekly Whole Foods runs. Bezos won’t notice, and I stay alert enough not to get caught. Breaking the rules is where I come from.
Randi Schalet is a retired psychologist living in Berkeley, California. Her non-fiction memoir pieces have appeared in Chicago Story South, Peauxdunque Review, The Manifest-Station, Under the Sun Magazine, Belmont Story Review, The Write Launch, and Rumen. Her poetry chapbook, The Last Things I’ll Remember, is forthcoming on August 21, 2026, from Finishing Line Press.
