Do You Deserve to Have Your Expensive Stroller Stolen?

Are you an urban lady with a lot of money and a kid? Beware, your material possessions are in danger.

In today’s New York Times, Elissa Gootman self-effacingly and wryly recounts her experience of leaving her child’s $400 stroller unlocked outdoors only to return to find it had been stolen and her subsequent quest to get the New York City Police Department to give an actual fuck about it (spoiler alert: no fucks were given). Apparently she’s not the only privileged parent to face a similar problem,

“To the low life’s that stole my baby girl’s stroller on wednesday night: I hope you feel good about yourself for stealing from a baby,” a parent in Eugene, Ore., posted on craigslist last month, alongside a photograph of a baby nestled in a tan Baby Trend with pink flowers and a tray table.

In Niagara County, N.Y., a woman reported in May that her $500 stroller was taken from her car while she stopped in to check on the progress of construction at her new home.

In Toronto, Lindsay Taylor, a dad of two, tracked down his stolen stroller on craigslist, where it was posted at 3 a.m., hours after it disappeared from outside his home. He met the seller in a parking lot. “It had chalk marks my son had made,” he told The Toronto Star. “It was incredibly obvious.”

Getting shit stolen from you sucks, especially when you realize that you maybe didn’t need to have such an expensive thing in the first place.

Writes Gootman,

Is the idea of a $400 stroller so outlandish that, on some level, those who have so lost sight of their own privilege as to leave one unattended almost deserve to be robbed? (But my stroller was a double! And we do a lot of walking! On bumpy sidewalks!)

She should thank her lucky stars that her stroller was stolen when she and her baby were safely indoors rather than strollerjacked by a baby from the wrong side of the tracks while they were on a walk. “Drive the stroller to my cousin’s chop shop and nobody gets hurt!” the baby would say, brandishing a bloodstained silver Tiffany rattle. And mother and baby would have to oblige, attempting to nonverbally formulate an escape plan. Finally, the baby would tuck and roll, leaving the mother alone to face the dead-behind-the-eyes career criminal tot. Your $400 stroller’s safety features (airbags and a navigation system and heated leather seats and the like, I’d imagine, for that price) can’t protect you now.