Everything You Wanted to Know About Tumblr’s Shoplifting Community
A large community of “lifters” on Tumblr are sharing tips, tricks, and advice on how to shoplift without getting caught.
“Why do I shoplift things?” Lifting Stones asks on their Tumblr page. “Because I need things to live, and the companies have the things, and they are not sentient creatures capable of experiencing pain because I took it from them.”
Tumblr might be known for meme pages and cosplayers, but the platform also hosts a thriving shoplifting community. Members blog, brag, offer tips, post of their hauls— and sometimes share some pretty deep economic analysis.
Shoplifting has risen dramatically since the pandemic began. And although not everyone in Tumblr’s “lifting” community does so out of economic need, many do. Retailers, police departments, and loss prevention researchers have reported a rise in theft of basic necessities, things like food and hygiene products, for example. However, what’s interesting about the lifters on Tumblr is that many see lifting not just as a way to meet their basic needs, but as a whole culture. But this is nothing new, the embrace of shoplifting as a political phenomenon has its roots in a time before the internet even existed.
In 1971, Steal This Book, a guide to fighting the government and corporations by any means possible by American activist and socialist Abbie Hoffman, was published. It sold more than 100,000 copies. Among many other topics, the book laid out techniques for shoplifting. Hoffman helped to bring shoplifting as a political act into the mainstream by outlining a theory of capitalist society that sees, according to the book’s introduction, “corporate feudalism as the only robbery worthy of being called “crime,” for it is committed against the people as a whole.” He questioned deeply ingrained assumptions about what should and should not be legal, and ripped the mask off of a broken system which was not serving the people that depended on it.
Hoffman goes on to write, “The dictionary of law is written by the bosses of order. Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral.”
Since “Steal this Book,” was published, shoplifters and retailers have been locked in a kind of arms race. Loss protection departments work tirelessly to build an arsenal of strategies and technologies to reduce loss from theft, while shoplifters continue to find workarounds and new ways to thwart these department’s best efforts.
Things like clothing censors, part of electronic article surveillance, have been around since the 1970s, but if you have the right tools they can be easy to remove. More recently, intelligent CCTV systems and facial recognition technology has been deployed to deter shoplifting, and if you read some of the posts of Tumblr, these more recent technologies are a topic of concern among lifters. There have been many advancements in inventory management as well, as retailers develop business intelligent tools and utilize technologies like radio frequency identification devices. But this hasn’t stopped shoplifters. In fact, a common theme among some of the posts on Tumblr is urging lifters to only lift what they need and not to take too much of a single item to avoid detection by loss prevention departments or employees.
Before Tumblr’s lifting community emerged, there was another medium for lifters to continue sharing information on best practices. In the early 2000s, the decentralized anarchist collective known as Crimethinc deployed strategies to fight capitalism by dropping out of it: Quit your job, get off the grid if you can, dumpster dive, squat, scam, and shoplift. Some of these tactics and ideas were outlined in Harbinger, the group’s newsletter, as well as in many books and various zines. The following is a quote from an essay written as a Special Report, taken from their 2000–2009 archive.
“Shoplifting is a refusal of the exchange economy. It is a denial that people deserve to eat, live, and die based on how effectively they are able to exchange their labor and capital with others. It is a denial that a monetary value can be ascribed to everything, that having a piece of delicious chocolate in your mouth is worth exactly fifty cents or that an hour of one person’s life can really be worth ten dollars more than that of another person. It is a refusal to accept the capitalist system, in which workers have to buy back the products of their own labor at a profit to the owners of capital, who thus get them coming and going.”
Crimethinc was part of a broader community promoting scamming and shoplifting as a response to the injustices of capitalism. Zines like Evasion and Scam were also circulated widely among alternative communities and provided not just advice and ideology, but also a sense of community for a generation of alienated young people looking to remove themselves from the system.
In more recent years, shoplifters began sharing tips on blogs and online forums. Many of these forums are relatively obscure, and many, like Reddit’s lifting sub-communities, have been taken down because they are in violation of the platform’s rules against illegal activity. Tumblr’s online lifting community began gaining traction in the last few years, and despite its recent crackdown on NSFW images, it’s still thriving.
“Tumblr’s been really helpful to me and has taught me different ways to move my body, how to remove shoplifting tags, how to get past some security devices,” M, whose Tumblr blog is titled “fvckcapitalism,” told me over the phone. “Everyone likes posting haul pictures, and I think posting them gives your brain endorphins. But I really like to give people advice or offer input about stores. I like to hear people’s experiences and read their advice as well.”
Because of the volume of lifting posts and accounts, Tumblr’s lifting community has been able to provide a fairly thorough and comprehensive amount of lifting tips and tricks. A hallmark of this is their hyper-specific guides tailored to different stores. Need some makeup from Ulta? You can probably find a how-to-guide. Best techniques to avoid detection at Rite-Aid? Tumblr’s got you covered. Does Dick’s Sporting Goods count items in their dressing room? Does Anthropologie use RFID? What kind of security tags does Victoria’s Secret use? The list goes on.
“It’s been really helpful to me,” M told me. “It taught me like different ways to move your body or how they get past some security devices. I don’t want to get too specific because I don’t want to give away how people do things. But I think without Tumblr I would have never considered waste removed shoplifting tags, I would have just been like, oh, I can’t have that.”
Like the collectives of the ’70s and early 2000s, Tumblr’s lifting blogs also provide a sense of community. “None of my friends in real life shoplift, so it’s nice having friends on Tumblr that do,” M said. “It helps with some of the isolation and alienation that comes with lifting.”
Like the zines that preceded it, many of the lifting blogs on Tumblr express an anti-capitalist ethos. The ideological underpinnings for each blog are as unified as an anarchist collective like Crimethinc, but there is a loose code of ethics that many Tumblr bloggers subscribe to. Supporting other lifters and not getting greedy are two which come up often.
“i [sic] know seeing hauls of like ten of the same palette and millions of things is intriguing, but that’s what gets us caught. you can hardly take one palette without it being noticed let alone five. please don’t be greedy,” urfavoritelifter writes.
Another important rule that many adhere to is: do not steal from small businesses.
“I avoid any small businesses,” M told me. “Primarily, I like to focus on stores that use prison labor. And sometimes it’s also just stores [that are owned by] large corporations.”
The ideological positions of lifters on Tumblr often go beyond choosing where or where not to shoplift from — they also explain the whole ethos behind lifting itself. Many bloggers articulate an anti-capitalist critique of the consumer economy, including feminist analyses around the role of commodities in gender performance.
In a 2016 post by a user named “Fancy Broke Gal” titled “Why lifting makeup is 100% okay,” the blogger explains that “a capitalist patriarchy economically profits on the hatred of women… this is why women are forcibly bombarded with images of what were (sic) supposed to look like since birth.”
“Makeup, contrary to what anti lifters say, IS a need. The temporary relief and confidence that comes from makeup is something I personally NEED…even though it is a disgusting tool of patriarchal oppression. Think critically about makeup even though we all love it, and lift it instead of lining the pockets of the white men who subjugate us. It’s all we can do.”
Not bad for being super sneaky bc I was with my family.”
“I first lifted myself when I was like twelve and thirteen — a poor kid who hung out at the mall. My mom also shoplifted because we lived in extreme poverty,” M said. “Continuing up to just up to a few years ago, lifting was still a necessity for me. There was a time three years ago where I had a job interview and my partner was like, ‘Don’t you have any pants without holes?’ I was like, no, I don’t.”
More recently, M has come to see shoplifting as an economic justice-oriented form of activism.
“I feel so frustrated and so angry and so burnt out and helpless against capitalism. And it’s a small thing that makes me feel less helpless. I still shoplift for myself, but I also shoplift things for my friends who are more oppressed than I am: things like care packages for disabled friends or people who have transitioned,” she said. “I shoplifted a ton of tampons and donated them to people who had been through a hurricane and lost everything.”
Although M is no longer living in extreme poverty, she does still steal for herself: Things like fancy cheeses, clothes, and food and toys for her dogs.
“It is not at this moment a necessity,” M told me. “It allows me to enjoy life more and be less stressed out and have things I wouldn’t otherwise be able to have.”
What makes the Tumblr shoplifting blogs so illuminating is that they force us to examine some interesting questions that we may not otherwise consider. Under a capitalist economic system, what is the line between a need and a want? And is that even a relevant question?
The question that these blogs pose is systemic. Should only those with wealth be allowed to have nice things? Should caretakers, service workers, janitors, anyone living in poverty or making close to minimum wage, not be able to partake in the things that make life a little bit more rich? This seems to be the general consensus under capitalist ideology, although if you really unpack that idea, it comes from a place of blame. Blaming the poor for their poverty and assuming that those with wealth somehow “earned” theirs.
So thank you, Tumblr. Never would I have thought that such rich systemic critique would be contained within your servers. Because whether you agree with the tactics or not, Tumblr’s lifting community, just like the zines and books preceding them, forces us to at least ask these questions and maybe even begin to uncover some of the assumptions that many of us carry around with us as we navigate this weird and often self-contradictory economic system.
