by rod lee

Hello, friends, a word about Mark Scamman, who some of you might remember as store manager of the Market Basket in the town of Oxford, until his recent retirement to Cape Cod, where he and his wife Amy are running a B&B.

Mark Scamman, retired from the Market Basket store in Oxford, and now an author.

  As he was preparing to bring to a close his forty five-year career in the supermarket business, Mr. Scamman mentioned to me that he was planning to publish a book. I had no idea at the time what the subject matter would be; the assumption being that he would merely be reflecting on the vocation that helped him pay his way through college (the University of Lowell, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Management) and that he then embraced as his chosen method of employment.

 

  Turns out he wanted to write about shoplifting, a crime he was thoroughly familiar with.

  With the release of Larceny in the Aisles/Stories from a Supermarket Manager, Mr. Scamman has not only shed new light on an age-old scourge of retailers everywhere, he has done so with the touch of someone who sees the humor in many of the incidents he encountered along the way.

  Maybe this was not so true when they occurred; but, as is the case with police departments across the Commonwealth, they can be now, in looking at them in the rear-view mirror.

  His book does in fact pay homage to members of the law enforcement community who are dealing with the same kind of misbehavior he saw from customers, day after day, month after month.

  The cover of Larceny, designed by Destinee Almeida, and her illustrations inside, capture the hilarity that so often accompanies attempts to pilfer product. Ms. Almeida’s cover artwork depicts a man preparing to stuff a Jack Daniels whiskey bottle into his coat.

  I have to admit, I am a sucker for the kind of stories Mr. Scamman shares in Larceny. A typical example comes not from him, but one of his store-manager colleagues.

Entitled “Bloody mess,” it reads as follows:

In the late 1970s, this future manager was bagging groceries while his store manager chatted with some regular customers seated on benches in front of the store.

While talking to one, the manager noticed blood was trickling down the side of the man’s face. The customer was wearing a fedora hat, and the blood was slowly trickling down.

“Are you okay?”

The customer said yes and wiped the blood from his face. But it continued to trickle.

Concerned for the customer’s health, the manager took the hat off the man’s head to see where the blood was coming from. A package of steak was concealed under there. Its seal had broken, and the liquid inside (called purge) was the extent of his injury.

Mark Scamman presents fifty largely comedic moments like the aforementioned over the course of approximately one hundred eighty pages. In Chapter 25, entitled “Pecans for Pie,” he describes an encounter with an elderly woman during the holidays—“a tough time of year for many families.” A manager, he relates, noticed the woman put a bag of pecans in her purse in the baking aisle. “I was absolutely not going to have her arrested, but I also wanted to speak to her about stealing, even though she was older than me,” Mr. Scamman writes. “We did not go to the office, but I pulled her aside to talk. I quietly asked if she forgot to pay for the pecans she had in her purse. [She] started to cry, and said she needed them for her pecan pie she was making for Thanksgiving. She couldn’t afford to pay for them. The front-end manager and I were moved nearly to tears. He was the fastest in offering to pay for the pecans. He opened a register, deposited his money, and handed the pecans to the woman. “God bless you!” was her response. “Happy Thanksgiving,” we told her. Her story is one of too many to count.

From “A Carriage Full of Tide Detergent” to “Bubble Gum Theft in a Duffel Bag” to “The Jumper,” Mr. Scamman relies on notes he took over the years to address shoplifting in a light-hearted but at the same time serious manner.

His objective, he explains in the epilogue, “Thou Shalt Not Steal,” is to point out that shoplifters should not get off unpunished—as, unfortunately, they so frequently do. “Community restitution” or “community service” should be mandatory penalties, in his opinion.

  In the Introduction to Larceny, he says “during my career, I caught nearly one thousand shoplifters.”

  He knows, however, that there are more where they came from.

Contact Rod Lee at [email protected] or 774-232-2999.