Moral Dilemma

Here is a moral dilemma for you:

I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from church. A young family walked into the store right in front of me. A father, mother, little girl about three and a baby boy. Nice looking family. As I was wandering through the produce section and heading towards the deli area, I notice the little girl and the father are eating chicken wings. There is a chicken wing bar right in front of the deli counter. I glanced at their cart and there wasn’t a container of the wings there. Not to mention that if they did fill a container with wings, they are sold by the weight so they shouldn’t be eating them yet. I looked around to see if the store was giving away free samples and they weren’t.

So what to do? Clearly the father is teaching his daughter that it is ok to steal. Yeah, I know, it is only a chicken wing. But they aren’t free and available for anyone to snack on while they shop. It’s the same as eating a banana and throwing the peel away without paying for it. Or grabbing a donut from the bakery section, scarfing it down while you walk through the store and never telling the clerk who checked you out that you ate a donut. It doesn’t matter what the item is, stealing is stealing.

I followed them all the way through the store. Not on purpose, it’s just that they were working their way through the store at the same pace I was shopping. I did see the father throw the chicken bones into a trash bag on a store workers cart. I’m sure that worker was surprised to see chicken bones in and among her scraps of paper. And I hope she didn’t get in trouble from management because it would have looked like she stole the chicken wings.

I debated all the way through the store about whether or not to say something to them. But what should I say?

“Hey, did you know those chicken wings aren’t free?”

“Hey, nice job teaching your daughter how to steal?”

“I don’t want to pass judgment so I assume you are going to tell the clerk who checks out your groceries that you owe her for two chicken wings, aren’t you?”.

I ended up not saying anything. All the way through the store and in line behind them at the checkout. I almost said something to the clerk after they walked away but I didn’t. I was just afraid the clerk might say that it was alright because it was only chicken wings and then I would be faced with the dilemma of whether or not to explain to the clerk why stealing is wrong.

What gets me is that, ten or eleven years from now, when that little girl is a teenager, her parents will probably get a call from the police saying their daughter has been arrested for shop lifting. She was caught at Macy’s slipping a lipstick into her pocket or hiding a pair of earrings in her purse. Her parents will meet her at the police station and ask her why she did it? “Why would you do something like that? We taught you better than that!!”. Well, no, you didn’t. You taught her from a young age that it is ok to take things without paying for them. So don’t be surprised if a decade from now you are bailing your daughter out of jail and she will then have a record of being a thief. And this time the blame is clearly on the parents.

So, should I have said something? Should I have confronted them? Should I have reported them? What is the right thing to do? And that is the moral dilemma on a Sunday afternoon.