Photo : snyferok ( iStock )

In putting together each day’s Newswires here at The Takeout, we tend to come across a lot of thievery news. Often, while it’s good for a laugh, the crime is too slight and the punishment too swift for it to really amount to much. Occasionally, somebody steals a Pepsi truck with its driver still in it, and makes the staff’s entire day. In either case, we’re regularly reminded that people really like free shit, whether legal or not, and will go to occasionally ridiculous lengths to get it.


Today’s item for the file comes from Louisiana, where a still-at-large Walmart shopper made the bold move of stealing stuff by covering it in... other, also stolen stuff. Southern Mississippi newspaper The Sun Herald reports of a woman allegedly leaving the store in Gonzales, Louisiana with 21 bottles of Tito’s vodka, which for the sake of maximum subterfuge she buried beneath five packages of toilet paper. She left the store with the $784 in merchandise without being caught, and is currently sought by Gonzales police.

To be fair, anybody who’s ever worked retail can tell you that most store insurance policies are built to cover things just like this, and that employees are typically discouraged from stopping or confronting customers directly. With that said, it’s still 21 bottles of vodka, and we can only imagine the conversations taking place between staff members who watched her load them into the cart, glance around while contemplating what would draw little enough attention to secure her escape, and settling on “five large bundles of toilet paper” with the confidence of Anne Hathaway stealing her own necklace from the Met Gala.


The accused Walmart thief remains at large, the spiritual contemporary of that guy who stole all that Hennessey from a Costco not too long ago.