A longtime staff writer for the New Yorker known for bashing capitalism bragged that she has stolen from her local Whole Foods “on several occasions” in a New York Times podcast.
Jia Tolentino, 37, made the shocking admission while joining left-wing streamer Hasan Piker and Times’ opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman for a Wednesday episode about so-called “microlooting” from mega-corporations.
Examples tossed around by the trio ranged from everyday consumers sharing passwords for streaming services to brazen criminals pilfering paintings from the Louvre Museum.
When Spiegelman suggested pocketing produce from Whole Foods, Tolentino confessed she already had “on several occasions.”
The scribe said one of her duties as a member of her ritzy Brooklyn neighborhood’s mutual aid group was to buy groceries for one of her neighbors, Miss Nancy.
“And so I’d be getting Miss Nancy all of her groceries, and then I would finish, and I’d be like, oh my God, four lemons, I forgot four lemons. And on several occasions I was like, I’m just going to go back in, grab those four lemons and get the hell out,” Tolentino said.
“At the time I was like, I had not been to Whole Foods. I had a bit more consumer discipline about where I was spending my money then, and I already felt like I was in the hole, even by shopping there. And it certainly felt, in a utilitarian sense, I was like, this is not a big deal,” she added.
An organic lemon from Whole Foods costs $1.29 before taxes, according to the market’s website.
Piker teased that she “should go to prison” for the petty theft.
Tolentino was already employed by Condé Nast, one of the most prestigious and highest paying mass media companies in the country, when she started microlooting from Whole Foods.
Piker then brushed aside her apparent shoplifting, saying that mega-corporations like Whole Foods have already “factored in” the loss of simple produce so that it won’t impact their bottom line.
Piker, a self-proclaimed Communist, also endorsed “full chaos” of shoppers “stealing wantonly” and wholly bypassing the self-checkout machines.
When pressed on stealing from government-run grocery stores, like one planned by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Piker and Tolentino faltered.
“No, I would not, because I feel like that’s taxpayer-funded, it’s union labor, and the prices are also adjusted regardless,” Piker said.
Tolentino, meanwhile, posed a hypothetical on the public outrage there would, or should, be when mega-corporations rip off the public.
“The converse is, oh, what if every major grocery chain stole from workers and consumers? And that is basically true, right? It speaks to the thing where harm committed by the individual, strangely, continually draws more ire than the same harm being committed by a structure. And so I kind of am inclined toward this. Everyone, try it. See what happens,” Tolentino implored.
