Newswise — Shoppers who leave the store without buying anything are much more likely to be walking away with stolen merchandise than those who do make a purchase, a University of Florida study finds.

People who left without paying for any items were six times more likely to be shoplifters who bypassed the check-out line to avoid drawing attention to themselves, said criminologist Richard Hollinger.

Professional shoplifters often scan the store to make sure no none is watching them tampering with the products, he said.

“We all believe it to be courteous behavior when a retailer asks ‘May I help you?’ but what they’re really saying is ‘We know you’re here, please don’t shoplift,’” he said.

The study published in Justice Quarterly additionally disputes the image of most shoplifters being female. “The rule of thumb always has been that women shoplift more than men simply because there are more women shoppers,” he said. “But we were able to determine that men actually stole more often than women. Many of them hit the film, pain relievers or batteries, steal them in large quantities and sell them, using shoplifting as a way to feed their drug habit.”

Shoplifters are most commonly between the ages of 35 and 54. These middle-aged adults, most of them gainfully employed, were “primary household shoppers” who occasionally stole to acquire goods whose cost stretched beyond their household budgets.

There is also some evidence to suggest that certain shoppers, particularly blacks, are scrutinized more heavily and even harassed in various stores, researchers concluded.

Overall, blacks and Hispanics were no more likely than whites to steal merchandise. However, when race and gender were examined by subcategory, Hispanic females stole the most, shoplifting at more than seven times the rate of white females, he said.

Many stole household items they needed, such as medicine or makeup, or snatched a candy bar or lollipops off the shelf for their children, whom they had brought along, if they started to fuss or cry, he said.

Few studies have focused on family shoplifting, except those that examine “distraction teams,” Hollinger said. “These shoplifters might take children along with them, usually with an ice cream cone or a candy bar in hand, mainly to distract the sales clerk, who tries to head off the kids from damaging the merchandise while mom and dad steal,” he said.

Shoplifting is sometimes called the crime tax. “It’s been estimated that about $400 is spent annually by each family in America just to pay for the cost of replacing these stolen goods,” he said.

Recent evidence also suggests that many professionally shoplifted items are even fenced overseas and used to fund other criminal activities, including terrorism, he said. 

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