BROOKLYN — Two Park Slope Food Coop members were arrested after store management accused them of shoplifting approximately $18,000 worth of goods over the course of 2016, police said.
The thefts originally came to management's attention "through reports by checkout workers who noticed not all goods were offered for scanning at their registers," the store's biweekly publication, the Linewaiters' Gazette, reported in December.
Management took no action after staffers first reported their suspicions of the members stealing groceries on separate occasions, general coordinator Joe Holtz told Gothamist.
The store only alerted police when the members returned.
They were caught red handed, an NYPD official said. Officers took the first member, a 79-year-old man from Brooklyn, into custody on Nov. 30 for walking out of the store at 782 Union St. without paying for various groceries.
They arrested the second member, a 42-year-old man from Manhattan, on Dec. 6, after he removed property from the store without purchasing it. Police charged both men with petit larceny, and the second with an additional charge of criminal possession of stolen property.
Staff determined the men had collectively stolen a total of $18,000 in goods by checking store surveillance footage over the year, Gothamist reported.
Shoplifting has been a growing issue for the member-owned and operated store since at least 2013, when the New York Times reported it was losing $438,000 a year in stolen items. Members are essentially stealing from themselves, Holtz noted then.
Typically, the co-op punishes thieving members by banning them from the premises for life. On occasion, it summons the police to handle repeat offenders.
Founded in 1973, the co-op has more than 17,000 members, who work 2-hour-and-45-minutes shifts once a month. According to the Linewaiters' Gazette, net sales in 2016 through Sept. 11, 2016, were up 6.1 percent, from $31,041,529 to $32,924,991, compared to the same period last year.
