Following up on my previous post, I received a private message saying, 'So they steal, so what? The country is in crisis, and you won't get poor.'

First, we will get poor, the whole country will. The annual volume of theft in Russian food retail alone amounts to hundreds of billions, and only a small part of that is theft due to outright poverty.
Most often, it's dairy products, bread, etc. - basic necessities.

But the remaining 90-95% is expensive alcohol (no one steals wine for 300 rubles or gin for 500 rubles), red fish, caviar, cheeses, etc.
There is even a whole black market where stolen goods are sold.

None of this is on the list of essential products, and it cannot be categorized as 'stealing out of hunger.'

I experienced the 90s as a child in Chisinau (not even in Moscow), but I well remember people near stores asking to buy them food, asking for bread or kefir.
It was a situation where the very poor asked for help from the simply poor, and my parents sometimes bought such a 'dinner' for others.
There were not only no normal jobs, but also no vacancies that promised to pay.

And in more prosperous and good times (like now), we have a situation where some people are not satisfied with just good/ordinary/normal products; they want luxury and overconsumption, and for free.

Also, I had a classmate who wrote in notebooks with a pencil so she could erase everything with an eraser and reuse the notebook.

Which category of poverty does that fall into in the context of 2026?

But no one tried to steal red fish and champagne worth 4000 rubles.