When I was 14 and 15 I worked as a cashier at a local convenience store/pharmacy called “Tru Value Drugs.” It was my first official job (I had done a little babysitting and some “tutoring” of English for my younger Chinese-born neighbors before that). I got the job because the owner of the store was the father of a girl who played in the same little league softball organization. A couple of months before the job he had promised me was to start, I was playing in a game against his daughter. He “joked” with me that if I played too well that he would take the job away from me.

The job itself was simple enough. Most interesting, socially speaking, was getting to see the gambling addicts. We had a lotto machine and customers would come get lotto tickets. I saw that some came in every day and played tickets with the exact same numbers. And I saw that when someone won money off a scratch-off lotto card, they almost always used the money to immediately buy a new scratch-off. The store sold cigarettes, too, and after a few months I could almost always guess exactly what cigarettes people were going to buy based on their appearance. The Black men smoked Newports, for example, and the women over 50 smoked Virginia Slims.  

I learned a lot about stealing in that job. The owner’s father, a man in his late seventies, used to hang around the front of the store. He told me about a trap he had once set to catch a long-time employee, a 60ish year old woman who worked the day shift: they had someone come in and pretend to buy a $9.99 product. The fake buyer just left a ten dollar bill on the counter, said, “keep the change,” and walked out. Apparently the cashier just pocketed the ten without ringing it up on the cash register. They fired her. 

My older brother advised me on how I too could steal: he suggested I intentionally give the wrong change to customers. 20 cents here and 25 cents there would add up to quite a bit after a five hour shift, he said, and if someone counted and saw I gave the wrong change (people almost never counted their coins), I could easily play it off as a mistake. I tried it out and he was right that it was easy. I didn’t do it for long, though, because it wasn’t actually that lucrative, and I felt like shit about it. 

I often stole directly from the store, though. We were supposed to pay the 60 cents for a candy bar or the $1.25 for a Snapple, but I usually took one of each per shift without paying. And once in a while I would steal a pack of Newport Lights for my brother (the white teenage boys preferred the light version of those menthol cigarettes).

So that’s all to say that I was no angel and I was beginning to lose my naitivity about how the world of work really worked. 

My shifts were usually a couple of days a week after school, from 4:30pm-9pm. I sometimes worked a Saturday or Sunday morning shift, if they needed me and I had time. One weekday evening a man came in; he was maybe 70. I don’t remember what he bought. After he left, I noticed that he had left his wallet on the counter. 

I was 14. I don’t even think I looked inside his wallet. I just wasn’t sure what to do, so I brought the wallet to the adult in the store. The owner wasn’t in, but there was a store manager who also worked at the pharmacy at the back of the store. I don’t even remember his name; I think it might have been Bob. I hardly had anything to do with Bob. I told him that a customer had just forgotten his wallet. I gave it to him.

A little while later the customer came back, looking completely distressed, frazzled, asking about his wallet. I was very pleased to tell him that indeed, he had left it and yes, we had it – it was with the store manager at the back of the store. The man was so relieved.

After a bit I heard some upset voices. The man came back to me, distraught. He asked me, “did you see that there was money in here?” He said, “I had more than $200 cash in my wallet. I was going to take my family out to dinner. The cash is gone!” He was so upset.

At the time, it was really obvious to me that he was telling the truth and that Bob had taken the cash out of the wallet. I think that at the time I was a little afraid that the man would think that *I* had stolen the money. It is only in writing this story now that I realize that the man could have been running a scam. I wish I remembered if I had seen the cash in the wallet. Maybe I did, because in that moment and for all of these years, I have felt sure that the manager stole the money.

Fourteen years old. I wanted to trust the adults around me to do the right thing. No matter who was lying in that situation, my young vision of the adults in my environment being morally responsible crumbled.

I mourn that loss of trust. And I mourn the reality that we live in a world where stealing is so commonplace – and that we humans are so prone to it. Maybe are just built this way; maybe we have had to learn it to survive capitalism. It’s hard to reconcile the idea that we are fundamentally theifs with the morals that we impose on ourselves to try to be good. At least sometimes, we’re not good. Maybe we just need to accept that; be open about it. If we weren’t all covering up our sins, we might at least feel a little less self-hate.