Woman Arrested, Loses Child for Eating a Sandwich

Normally, when you hear about cases where both parents are arrested and they lose custody of the child, you expect that the parents must have done something pretty horrendous. but in this case, all they did was eat a sandwich.

A Honolulu woman and her husband were arrested after she ate a sandwich in a Safeway and forgot to pay for it. The parents were charged with fourth-degree theft, a misdemeanor charge, and Child Protective Service took away their 2-year-old daughter. But later, the charges were dropped and the parents were reunited with their daughter.

Now this story has caused a bit of a debate about whether or not it's acceptable to eat something in your basket if you haven't payed for it. I remember when I used to work in a supermarket, I saw people open up bags of potato chips or boxes of cereal because they either got hungry or they wanted appease their crying child.  And that always bugged me a bit.

Personally, I don't think it's OK to eat something without paying for it first, but I also think Safeway really overreacted. They could have just simply pulled the woman aside and told her, "Hey, you need to pay for that." There was no need to get the police and especially Child Protective Services involved in this.

What do you think? Is it OK to eat something in the supermarket without paying for it first, or is it stealing?