When entering a shop in France you will often be greeted cheerily, but thereafter eyed with suspicion. Are you going to try and steal in my shop? Napoleon famously called the British a nation of shopkeepers. Well France is a nation of shoplifters, if my recent experiences are anything to go by.
In supermarkets the practice we call "grazing" - eating goods within the store with no intention of paying for them - is commonplace. Recently at lunch-time in Carrefour we watched a respectable-looking mother and her two daughters munching away at packets of sandwiches taken from the shelves. Each then casually dropped the empty plastic packet, footed it under the counter and wandered off.
You will often come across discarded food packaging among other items on the shelves. I chanced on an opened screw-cap bottle of wine, from which someone had taken several mouthfull to wash down their stolen lunch, and returned the now quarter empty bottle to the shelves. Another "grazer" had pierced the plastic film stretched over a large wedge of cheese, broken off a large chunk for themselves, and then returned the opened packet to the shelf, with the price and weight now wrong (and bacterial content unknown).
Its common to sample food like tasting one grape before commiting to buying a bunch, but I watched a middle-aged man in Monoprix brazenly break off a large bunch and breeze off across the store, shamelessly munching from the bunch in hand. Another shopper had peeled a complete satsuma "to try it" leaving it peeled and half-eaten in the basket.
Actual theft is less common because of security men poised at exits - that's stealing - but it also happens. At checkout it is customary to show your shopping bag or caddy is empty. On the same shopping excursion we watched an apparently respectable middle-aged man at the checkout carefully arranging his trolley. On the floor of the trolley, out of sight of the checkout girl, were two flat packets of expensive smoked salmon concealed by two conspicuously empty large shopping bags on top of them. The man loaded up the trolley, paid for the official shopping, and sailed off with his spoils. It had a practiced air to it.
Perhaps the French shopkeepers are right to keep a beady eye on you, as they know how some of their countrymen behave. Perhaps its French "politics of redistribution " - it's not fair, the supermarket has a lot of food and my needs are so small. Or perhaps its just old-fashioned "something for nothing"? Theft happens everywhere, usually a teenage thing, but in France it looks altogether too common, and by grown-ups old enough to know better, who are not necessarily "poor".
Tip: When shopping in supermarkets it's worth checking that what you have picked up hasn't previously been opened or tampered with.
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Other Contact: Carrefour, Nice TNL
on Mar 27, 2009
