What $1 Million in Theft Reveals About Holyoke Mall’s Larger Crisis

Society has always disliked people who commit crimes, and that’s understandable. What’s striking now, though, is how intensely people react to petty offenders. The level of anger directed at low-level shoplifters is almost on par with the disgust usually reserved for sex offenders. I see police departments post routine shoplifting arrests online and the comments are so vicious that it still surprises me anyone cares that much about a stolen hoodie.

I’m not arguing that theft should be tolerated or that the consequences should be trivial. But a single shoplifting incident, on its own, is generally minor, petty, and usually close to victimless. If one person walked out of Urban Outfitters with a sweatshirt once a year, the company wouldn’t even notice. You’d need a supercomputer to calculate the real impact of a missing $20 inside a multibillion-dollar corporation.

The issue is that shoplifters aren’t judged by the individual act—society heaps the aggregate losses on each of them. If retailers collectively lose billions nationwide, every individual thief gets blamed as if they personally caused the economic ripple effects.

Take Holyoke Mall as one example. Over a million dollars in merchandise has been stolen there this year alone—around $2,700 a day. With roughly 135 stores, that averages out to about $7,400 in losses per store annually. Holyoke Mall has become a hotspot for theft, and part of the reason is that most corporate retailers tell employees not to intervene. And that policy makes perfect sense. If you ran a large company, you wouldn’t want thousands of untrained employees physically confronting suspects. All it takes is one overzealous worker stabbing someone over a $50 jacket and suddenly Macy’s is on the hook for a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

Another driver of shoplifting in Holyoke is the culture around the crime. Shoplifting isn’t just impulsive anymore—it’s structured. There are actual shoplifting “rings,” groups of people who hit different stores together. Some travel between towns and hit multiple locations a day. In Holyoke, you can literally see people pushing shopping carts full of stolen merchandise through the streets, selling items for whatever they can get.

But calling this some high-level criminal enterprise gives it more credit than it deserves. At the end of the day, these are people who walk into stores and steal stuff. The real engine behind this whole ecosystem—the thing that fuels the uptick—is one thing: substance abuse.

Addiction has shredded Holyoke. Drive downtown and it’s impossible to miss. Fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, xylazine—you name it. Crime in the city revolves around drug use and exploiting the desperation that comes with addiction. Dealers use drug-dependent people as distributors, paying them not with money but with drugs. And when it comes to shoplifting, dealers or middlemen will hand addicts lists of items to steal in exchange for a small amount of whatever substance they’re using. A stolen Gucci bag worth a thousand dollars might earn the thief a hundred dollars’ worth of crack or heroin—if that.

When someone is addicted, unemployed, and carrying a long record, shoplifting or dealing becomes the most “logical” way to survive. That’s why the cycle continues.

Fixing this would require addressing addiction head-on. If drug dependency vanished tomorrow, the bulk of this petty crime economy would collapse with it. The real solution lies in aggressive addiction treatment and building support systems for the next generation—kids growing up in households affected by substance use—so they have a better shot at avoiding the same path. It’s far easier to shape the future than to remake adults whose lives have already been derailed.

Some people argue the laws are too lenient. In Massachusetts, theft under $250 used to be a felony. The threshold was eventually raised to $1,200 to account for inflation, which makes sense when we’re talking about someone with no record who steals once in their life. A felony is devastating—it can make someone unemployable—and it’s unreasonable to impose that for a low-dollar offense that hasn’t been meaningfully adjusted in decades.

But when it comes to repeat offenders, a lot of people want the hammer dropped. And realistically, it already is. Serial shoplifters do see escalating punishment, from months in jail to multiple years as the offenses pile up. Still, some commenters insist they should be “locked up forever,” which ignores the broader context. You can’t solve a drug-driven economic crisis by throwing every low-level thief into prison indefinitely. You lose sight of the actual problem.

Now, again, to be absolutely clear, none of this is meant to excuse the behavior. Shoplifting isn’t harmless, and it isn’t something society should shrug off. What I am saying is that pouring more resources into treating addiction would pay dividends—both financially and for the very stores absorbing these losses. Where we choose to direct our tax dollars matters, and addiction services are too often dismissed with an eye roll, treated like a waste instead of the preventative investment they actually are.

Massachusetts now allows certain offenders to receive addiction treatment instead of jail time at Stonybrook, and in my opinion, that’s an enormous step forward that hasn’t gotten anywhere near the credit it deserves. Policies like that genuinely affect communities, and more importantly, they shape the next generation. If we want fewer shoplifters, fewer overdoses, fewer cycles of petty crime feeding bigger problems, then investing in treatment—not harsher punishments—is the path that actually moves society somewhere better.

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