A Warning to Shoplifters: Steal This Garment and Dye

In an attempt to deter increasingly crafty shoplifters, a growing number of clothing stores are turning to a sort of doomsday device--a tag that, if tampered with, squirts the garment with an indelible dye.

The theory: Sometimes you have to ruin a dress to save it.

“If thieves know they can’t sell it and they can’t wear it, then they won’t steal it,” says Don Barnett, whose company makes ColorTag, one of two such products on the market.

The other is called INKTAG, and here’s how it works.

Put yourself, for a moment, in the role of a shoplifter. You are strolling through a department store when you see an Anne Klein cream linen suit for $515 that you must have.

You notice a white plastic disc about two inches in diameter clamped on the skirt like a sandwich. It reads: “WARNING: Forcing tag open causes breakage. Permanent ink sprays out. Injury can occur from broken glass, metal and ink.”

Since grenades are not customarily attached to dresses, you disregard the warning. Anyway, you figure, you can always remove the disc in the safety of your own home. So you take it into the dressing room, stuff it into your purse, and head for the exit.

You step out of the store, exultant. But when you get the dress home and try to pry the disc off with a screwdriver, your hands are suddenly squirted with blue, red and yellow ink that also stains the dress.

The stain wears off your hands in a few days, but repeated trips to the dry cleaner fail to eradicate the spots on the dress. You can’t wear it anywhere, except to Halloween parties and the hipper downtown clubs.

Three vials inside the disc-tag were rigged to break when it did, releasing three teaspoons of “a biological stain that interacts with the cells of natural fibers so it can’t be washed out,” according to Robert DiLonardo of Security Tag Systems in St. Petersburg, Fla., which makes INKTAG.

If the garment had been purchased, the tag would have been cleanly removed by a sales clerk with a small device bolted down next to the cash register.

DiLonardo said his company has sold several hundred thousand tags to 40 stores since production began last fall; ColorTag says its product, on sale for two years, is now used in hundreds of stores.