Former Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman in the dock of the Auckland District Court where she pleaded guilty to charges of shoplifting. Photo / Dean Purcell
What sets these people apart from the hundreds of people shoplifting every day is how much some of them have to lose.
Mary* is an example of a surprising shoplifter. The middle-class Hamilton pensioner was well into her 60s when she was hauled before the court.
Mary’s daughter, Gayle*, has spent years untangling what she realised, at the time, must have been decades of theft (Gayle initially shared her mum’s story in detail – before Gayle and her whānau asked that their names be changed).
“It became retrospective, my knowledge about Mum’s shoplifting,” Gayle says. “Mum’s brother supported her in court and suggested that her shoplifting was a result of Dad having had terminal cancer. But she was shoplifting before that.
“Once we knew that she was going to court about it, the penny seemed to drop, ‘Well, Mum probably didn’t pay for that, either’.”
The perfume, scarves, and jewellery the pensioner used to bring back from overseas trips were all probably shoplifted, Gayle realised.
Why did a woman of good social standing risk it all? One reason, Gayle discovered, was that Mary’s mum used to steal too. However, the main reason was Mary wanted attention from her family, Gayle says.
Love, loss and other motivations
The number one name associated with shoplifting in New Zealand is Ghahraman, who stole more than $8000 worth of clothes in Wellington and Auckland in 2023, derailing her career as an MP.
“I’m as baffled as anyone … What the hell was I doing?” Ghahraman told TVNZ’s John Campbell in June, saying her actions were “self-sabotage” to “get out” of “a long period of being in quite a dark place” and agreeing she was, in Campbell’s words, “S*** at shoplifting and never going to get away with it”.
“I just really wanted to punish myself, I guess, and in a really stupid way,” Ghahraman told Campbell.
John Campbell interviews former Green MP Golriz Ghahraman. Photo / 1News
Stealing to force the ending of a stressful career is behaviour Wellington clinical psychologist Dr Dougal Sutherland has seen before. Sutherland names actor Winona Ryder as an example of a person with a huge amount to lose using shoplifting to try and end intense stress.
Megan Fox, Bai Ling, Lindsey Lohan, Amy Schumer, and Rudy Giuliani’s daughter have all admitted shoplifting, though their reasons are diverse. Schumer, for example, told media that her six years of shoplifting between the ages of 14 to 21 tied in with sickness, bankruptcy, and divorce between her parents, saying “I was relieved because I got caught”.
Amy Schumer says she made her diagnosis public in order to help other women.
The high-flying professionals Sutherland sometimes assesses, who have stolen handbags, jewellery, clothes, and accessories, can have similar stress-related motivations to Ghahraman and Ryder.
“They knew if they got caught, that it might allow them to end the job they were in, which they really weren’t liking anyway, but they couldn’t see any other way out of it,” Sutherland says.
Wellington clinical psychologist Dr Dougal Sutherland.
“The logical thing would just be to resign, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do that because that would bring quite a sense of shame. They knew that if they got caught [shoplifting], they would have to finish their job, rather than them having to do it themselves.”
Sutherland has also seen more than one patient stealing thousands of dollars worth of items to impress a partner in a waning relationship.
However, New Zealand experts don’t file ‘atypical shoplifting’ under kleptomania.
Victoria University psychology associate professor Dr Hedwig Eisenbarth says shoplifting is a behaviour – not a type of person – so the klepto label doesn’t help.
Trauma, drugs, cries for help, and poor mental health make people do irrational things, the experts agree. A case in point involved a Crown prosecutor from Meredith Connell who in 2011 stole $200 worth of food from a supermarket across the road from the Auckland court where she was working on a case, while suffering an eating disorder.
Eisenbarth points to a 2019 United States study led by Dr Miranda Nadeau which identified six shoplifting cluster-groups: impulsive (20% of the sample); depressed (18%); hobbyist (18%); addictive–compulsive (9%); economically disadvantaged (7%); and loss-reactive (28%).
Dr Hedwig Eisenbarth, associate professor of psychology at Victoria University of Wellington.
The loss-reactive group, cited by Ghahraman’s defence, happens in a small percentage of people who have the interesting combination of strong ethics, minimal visible depression and anger, but who feel they are losing control of their lives, Eisenbarth says.
She adds that stress, anxiety and less exposure to human interaction can drive atypical theft, but is unsure if loss-reactive behaviour explains retail crime surging while Kiwis were under lockdown 2020-2021.
An entitlement to steal with ‘invincibility’
Retail security expert Shane Wijohn thinks a sense of entitlement is a main driver of the constant torrent of lower, middle, and upper-class shoplifters his staff deal with at dozens of Foodstuff stores across Auckland.
The 2008 Global Financial Crisis drove “an explosion of theft” and triggered stealing amongst “a cross section of society” – including the middle class, elderly, servicemen, and occasionally high-profile people with respectable careers, Wijohn says.
Today, shoplifters are more than ever trying to get away with meat down their pants or entire bags of loot and often threaten Wijohn’s security guards.
The New Worlds, Pak’nSaves, and Four Squares his staff serve reported a doubling in retail crime across 2022-2023, with 5124 thefts and assaults in Q1 2024, following two record high quarters.
Wijohn Security worker Lorene, centre, deals with two shoplifters responsible for hundreds of offences.
Wijohn emphasises that shoplifting ties in with recessions and inflation – in fact, it’s so predictable that his company rosters on extra security at stores when rises in food and petrol prices are announced.
Wijohn says the 2020-2022 Covid recessions “quadrupled” shoplifting, with people stealing steak, bread, milk, and butter or – as in a recent case at Woolworths in Papakura – $200 worth of mayonnaise in a suitcase.
To this day, Wijohn’s team is forced to keep up with social media offering shoplifters “a sense of invincibility not seen before”.
Store owners’ mixed feelings about punishing thieves
People who spoke to the Herald for this story agreed that most stores and security don’t, won’t, or can’t detain shoplifters because stores don’t want the publicity, don’t feel the law backs them up, or have little faith police will attend promptly.
Retail NZ chief executive Carolyn Young, representing businesses employing many of New Zealand’s 230,000 retail workers, says youth theft and organised stealing are the biggest concern, rather than affluent shoplifters, though retail theft combined is costing $2.6 billion per year.
Carolyn Young, CEO of Retail NZ.
Some of the stories retailers report to her are horrifying, including a recent incident in which a person set goods on fire to evacuate a store – just so they could steal.
Gary Morrison, chief executive of the NZ Security Association, represents 80% of the 25,000 licensed security practitioners in NZ and says the Crimes Act 1961 is old, poorly worded, and has too much “grey area” when it comes to how employees can stop crime happening before their eyes.
Morrison, whose association is asking for the right to handcuff offenders, echoes Wijohn’s observation that the lockdown era resulted in “a level of aggression that we hadn’t seen previously”, as well as a sense of entitlement to walk out with an entire trolley of stolen shopping. “There’s a perception that if you offend, there may not be a lot of consequences.”
Gary Morrison, CEO of NZ Security Association.
Whether it’s for the gain, for the thrill, because of impairment or to self-sabotage, there is no end to shoplifting in sight, though staff may be able to fight back more thanks to increased self-defence powers sought by retailers through the Ministerial Advisory Group for victims of retail crime.
Why this self-described ‘Robin Hood’ defends stealing
What goes through the minds of the six types of shoplifters operating across New Zealand?
One Aucklander, who goes by the name Right_Departure559 on Reddit, has pledged to continue to steal from New Zealand supermarkets by “gaming their online order system” in what they called a “Robin Hood-style” scheme.
The thief says they have good social standing – as a parent and school breakfast club helper – but says corporate-set supermarket prices “are doing more harm than me”.
“It’s like stealing a Big Mac.
“[I’m] sticking it to the man and getting one back for the price-gouging duopoly that has been ripping off Kiwis for years,” the thief says.
“I’m not filling my pocket with steaks and making a run for it. Supermarkets factor in shrinkage to their profit margins … As a low-income worker I’m not feeling too guilty about taking 0.00000001% of their profits.”
Right_Departure559 asked Kiwis on Reddit, “Am I just deluding myself and just a common thief or is there a moral justification for carrying on with this?”
While a few commenters voted ‘Eat the rich’, most supported user TheGirlInRead, who told the thief, “Your ‘corporate overlord’ narrative is a massive cope for shitty, selfish behaviour”.
