fair-trade shoplifting!

SHOPLIFTING FROM AMERICAN APPAREL
by Tao Lin

This is a true story about stealing from a corporation. American Apparel is a corporation. Therefore if they stop making a lot of profits they’ll stop existing, the fair-labor workplaces will be closed, another Circuit City or maybe Wendy’s will open, or else they’ll move their labor to Brazil or somewhere. I’m not critiquing anything right now, just stating facts. I’ll still be your friend if you drive a Hummer twice a day to Wendy’s to eat chicken nuggets. I’m just saying, don’t hate me for stealing from an independent clothing company, because then you’d be basing your hatred on something that isn’t real. The “organic vegan restaurants” I talk about in the third paragraph are Pure Food and Wine, Angelica Kitchen, and Sacred Chow. This story is labeled fiction because I left some things out, moved some things around, and I’m not sure if all the dialogue is exactly like it was in real life.

I had a reading that night in Brooklyn. I wanted a nicer shirt. American Apparel has nice shirts. I went to American Apparel. The security guard who normally stands in American Apparel wasn’t there. I held the shirt I wanted and walked around. I saw a strange man holding a book two inches from his face with his eyes over the top of the book. The man was looking at me. I thought he was just being strange. Many people are strange. I walked out of American Apparel holding the shirt. The strange man made noises behind me. I looked at him. He asked to see my shirt. “Do you work there?” I said. He said he did. “Do you really work for American Apparel?” I said. He said he did and showed me a police badge attached to a thing on a belt buckle under his oversize jersey. “Oh,” I said. We went inside. We went downstairs. They took my picture and put me in handcuffs. “Don’t steal from us,” said the manager. “Steal from some shitty corporation. We have fair-trade labor. I mean fair labor. We are subsidized by the government. We have goals that are aesthetically pleasing to the general public who wouldn’t ever use the word ‘aesthetically,’ which is part of why I think we still exist, or something.” “I spend my money on even better places,” I said. “Organic vegan restaurants.”