When police in suburban Washington raided the home of a suspected drug dealer last fall, they found the cocaine, all right, but also something unusual on the man’s shelves: nearly 20 large bottles of liquid Tide laundry detergent.
It turns out his customers were paying for drugs not with cash but with stolen Tide, police said. Tide has become a hot commodity among thieves at supermarkets and drugstores in at least some parts of the country.
For a variety of reasons, the detergent in the familiar flame-orange bottle is well-suited for resale on the black market: Everybody needs laundry detergent, and Tide is the nation’s most popular brand. It’s expensive, selling for up to $20 for a large bottle at stores. And it doesn’t spoil.
One Safeway supermarket in Prince George’s County, Md., was losing thousands of dollars’ worth of Tide a week before police made more than two dozen arrests. In St. Paul, Minn., a man pleaded guilty to stealing more than $6,000 worth of the stuff from a Walmart and was sentenced to 90 days in jail. Police in Newport News, Va., and other cities around the country have reported a spike in thefts.
In the Washington D.C. area, some CVS pharmacies have been attaching electronic anti-theft tags to bottles. A clerk at a busy, 24-hour CVS in northwest Washington, has seen too many Tide thefts to count. “It’s a hot item! It’s gotten out of hand,” Charlene Holton said. “They usually take maybe four, whatever they can carry out the door. We have to fight for that. It’s rough!”
The store has put electronic tags on its Tide, but that doesn’t stop the thieves, Holton said. They run out of the store with the detergent and remove the tags later with wire cutters.
Tide shoplifters often work quickly. Surveillance videos from a Safeway in Bowie, Md., showed crews of two or three people entering the store, loading up shopping carts and rushing outside, where they loaded the detergent into a waiting car. Police made nearly 30 arrests when they broke up the theft ring last fall.
It’s not clear how new the Tide theft phenomenon is, but organized theft has been a growing problem for U.S. retailers, costing them $3.53 billion in 2010, according to the National Retail Federation.
