Some years ago I taught with a sociologist friend who taught me a song he called “the mini mart Song.” And that’s what we called it when we asked him to sing it for us. He was a conservative man, all things being considered, and part of the fun of listening to him sing the old Jimmy Buffet lyrics was the contrast between what he seemed to be advocating and who he was.

For example.

There is a rationale embedded in the chorus. Here are the words: “We never took more than we could eat/There was plenty left on the rack”. And here is the rationale. Our theft was limited to our immediate needs. The fact that food was the need makes it seem somehow justified. Further, the theft was insignificant because there was so much—“plenty,” the song says—left on the rack. [1]

And not only that, there is at the end of the chorus a very respectable oath. “We all swore if we ever got rich/We would pay the mini mart back.” Of course, this “oath” is not quite so respectable if you sing it with a grin and a wink, which is the only way I have ever seen it performed and it is the way my friend always sang it.

I don’t want to go back to those days which seem–from the perspective of my present in Portland, Oregon–to be innocent and to dump on the song, much less on my friend who sang it many times at our request. On the other hand, a lot of retail stores in Portland are closing because they can’t control shoplifting. People go into these stores and take what they need or what they want or what they think they can sell. The stores can’t make up the loss and, at those levels of loss, can’t afford either the insurance or the extra enforcement (private security guards) that would be required.

So what happened? The people who are represented in the song are stealing the food in order to survive. That is what the lyrics say. But the the performance of the song is not a celebration of survival. It is a celebration of what amounts to a prank, with all the limitations the song places on the theft. You don’t take more than your immediate need requires; you leave a lot on the rack for legitimate sale to later customers; you have every intention of repaying the value of what you took. Those limitations.

But those “limitations” justify everything that is going on in Portland today. They don’t seem carefree anymore, looking at the wave of closures. The language, taken at face value, doesn’t justify any more today than it did back in 1973, when the song was popular. Is it that only a few people did it back then—starving artist types—and now it is very nearly a mainstream activity? Is that the difference?

Is it that back when the values that would have been inculcated by a family precluded all but the most desperate thefts, and now that such behavior has escaped the family and become part of the general urban culture, there are no more limits on it? Is that the difference?

No one imagines that back in the old days, you knew the guy who owned the mini mart and so limited your theft, but now they are all anonymous chains and so there is no reason to limit it. This was never a local grocery run by that nice couple who lived just down the street from your parents. So that’s not it.

Jimmy Buffet locates this kind of activity back in his “hard luck days.” Stealing for resale isn’t any part of anybody’s hard luck days. It’s a business model and it is predatory. I’d like to go on singing the song because I think it’s funny, but it isn’t as funny as it used to be.

[1]. More likely it was a shelf the food was left on, but we really need a word that is going to rhyme with “back.”