"Activate security cameras in area G."" I can hear those words as if it were yesterday. I was seventeen years old, still in high school, and out having fun with my friends. But in those years, my idea of fun was breaking the rules; more specifically - shoplifting.
On this particular day was like any other back then. My friends and I got up early, and since we didn't have to be in school for some reason on this Friday morning we decided to go on another "mission"." A mission was our slang for going out to boost things from local stores, something to keep it a little secretive in the event we were overheard while talking about our adventures in retail. This mission was to be my last, that very morning I had decided that I was getting to a point where I simply didn't find it exciting to steal any longer. I'd had a long and successful career as a thief, but the time had come to move on.
We began our mission with an easy target, the Ames store nearby where we all lived. We got into the store, picked out what we wanted, simply wheeled it out the door in a cart. That's one of the best kept secrets to thievery; if you don't act suspicious you can get away with almost anything. Nobody ever expects someone to fill up an entire shopping cart with high value electronic items and just push it through the front lobby and out the door. It's simply unheard of for a shoplifter to be that brazen, to be so bold. .
We used that type of mentality to our advantage. It was rare that anyone would even look in our general direction as we were leaving a store. We were just like any other customers pushing a cart full of purchases out the door. It never occurred to any casual observers that the cart contained thousands of dollars worth of merchandise and that we were teenage boys who could not realistically have enough money to pay for such a collection of items.
As we got to the car we inventoried our haul, it had been a good score.
