A Florida supermarket is crying foul after a bizarre shoplifting incident.
Police are looking for two women whom they say raided the shelves of the Winn Dixie supermarket in Fort Pierce. The two women, approximately 35 – 45 years old, who according to Fort Pierce police say, committed a bold crime and unloaded 75 sticks of Gilette men’s and Secret women’s deodorant into their purses.
“They just blatantly walk into this aisle and just empty a row of deodorant,” explained Fort Pierce Police Detective David Cuti. “I doubt 75 bars of deodorant were for personal use.”
The store’s surveillance video shows the women filling their purses with the items. The women stop when a clerk walks down the aisle, then they head down another aisle before police say they came back for more.
“It’s a little unusual that they were taking deodorant,”said Cuti. Sometimes they take higher priced items.
Cuti said the crime is not that uncommon and that often a few dishonest mom and pop stores are behind it.
“People would go out to some of these stores and take out some of these shelves and then go back to some of the smaller home-grown stores, the mom and pop stores, and sell them to them,”he said, “and they can make a 100% profit off of that. In recent cases we have had, the owner of the store actually solicited these people to get this merchandise.”
The deodorant retails for about five dollars each. That’s about $375 worth of deodorant.
It may seem like a relatively small crime, but police say, ultimately everyone else pays for it.
“It makes everybody’s prices go up,”said Cuti. “It’s tough times right now. We don’t need to make it any tougher.”