Billyburg Shop Uses Public Shame to Stop Shoplifting
By The Real Estate Desk August 10, 2010 4:20 pm
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It’s an age-old head-scratcher: what’s the most effective way to deal with shoplifters?
One Williamsburg grocery store chain is resorting to a decidedly old-fashioned tactic to deter the sticky-fingered set: public humiliation.
The Brooklyn Paper reports that the owner of Khim’s Millennium Markets has taken to posting photos of shoplifters caught in the act in the plate-glass windows of his three grocery stores:
“This lady shoplifted several times in our store so we are putting her pictures on the door,” owner Charlie Khim wrote underneath a security photo of an elderly woman at the shop on Driggs Avenue and N. 11th Street. “Lady, please don’t come to our store or out neighborhood … Now you are famous!”
It’s a humorous, albeit effective, tactic in suppressing theft in Khim’s high-end organic markets. Sure, the fliers clutter Khim’s windows — with a big black circle around the crook and the message, “Shoplifter!” scrawled in ink above his or her head — but the 12-year businessman said that the disgraced punks rarely come back.
Read the whole story here.
