Yes, Safeway does have some problems with shoplifting. In Portland, Oregon, for example, a couple was accused early this year of stealing an estimated $5 million of groceries from area Safeway stores over a period of years.

But arresting a pregnant Honolulu woman and her husband this week for forgetting to pay for two sandwiches while shopping with their 3-year old child–total value, $5– was a pretty incredible example of warped corporate and public policies. The incident has been drawing national and international attention to the policies of Safeway and HPD.

First question: How much did it cost the public (read: you and I) to arrest and detain this couple over a $5 dispute? With the expenses of police officers, transportation and processing costs, costs of CPS (brought in to care for the child while her parents were in custody), it has to be in the thousands of dollars. And that’s only if it doesn’t actually go to court, which will drive up those public costs to a whole new level.

So why are we subsidizing Safeway, a $7 billion corporate-owned chain of supermarkets, with our public dollars? They have other private remedies if they really think it makes sense to aggressively pursue this kind of incident. In my view, they shouldn’t be allowed to claim public resources to enforce their policy.

I can say with confidence that if I called the police to report someone for allegedly stealing $5 worth of anything from my house, HPD would not take them into custody, especially if they said it was just a mistake. I’m sure that anyone who has dealt with HPD after a household theft would agree. Guarantee. So the second question–Why is Safeway given special preferential treatment by the police that isn’t extended to the general public?

Then there’s the question of the Safeway checkout process. In the past, you rolled your cart up to the checkout stand and a clerk took it, emptied items out of it, then rang them up or passed them over a scanner. You paid the bill, retrieved your groceries, and went on your way. If you ate a sandwich and left the wrappers in the cart, the clerk would have found them and added them to the sale. No problem.

Then the corporate pencil sharpeners figured out that they could make us do much of the work formerly performed by Safeway’s own employees. They then spent millions of dollars to redesign and replace thousands of check-out stands across the entire chain of stores. The result is the current system where you push your cart into a narrow aisle and empty its contents onto a counter, where a checker then scans the items.

There are obvious problems with this. The design of narrow checkout aisles makes it hard to see what’s in the cart from your position behind it, especially items that slide into the back corners. There have often been occasions where I couldn’t see the last item or two, and they were only discovered with a bit of luck.

And now Safeway has the gall to say that not only are we required to subsidize their labor costs by taking over work previously done by store employees, they are going to hold us criminally liable for making any mistakes in the process. Here again, it seems to me that Safeway is responsible for checking to see whether customers have missed any items while moving them from cart to counter. If the items were hidden, that’s another story. But in this case there doesn’t seem to be any dispute that the sandwich wrappers were in plain view in the cart with no attempt to hide them away or dispose of them before checkout, either of which might have indicated an intent to shoplift.

I’m sure Safeway’s checkers are well trained to make sure the carts are empty before finalizing a sale, but customers have no such training. And, again, the customers view of the cart is severely restricted by those narrow checkout aisles, so things can be missed with even the best of intentions. And that is without the complications and distractions of a pregnant woman with a 3-year old in tow.

The incident is a black eye for Safeway’s corporate image, but it also raises questions about when and to what extent public resources should be subsidizing corporate policies like this one. Using police and courts to resolve this kind of minor dispute, shifting the enforcement costs from Safeway to the public, is just another form of invisible corporate welfare that needs to be reexamined.