Modern Living: Tis the Season to Be Wary

For most, Christmas is the season forgiving. But for a sizable substratum of society, it is a season for light-fingered taking. In the four weeks before Christmas, department stores suffer half their annual losses from shoplifting. Much of it is impulse stealing—the easiest to spot, because it is often done so clumsily, but the hardest to predict, because no segment of the population is immune. Only last week the Harvard Cooperative Society announced that it had caught 18 undergraduates shoplifting. Said Harvard Coop Manager John G. Morrill: "Everybody has the propensity to steal, and Harvard has its share of crooks."

Leggers &...