Dive N Surf and the Redondo Beach Police Department are searching for two men who stole $10,000 worth of sunglasses from an unlocked case in the middle of the afternoon last month.
On May 29, two men entered Dive N Surf, 504 N. Broadway, just after 3:30 p.m. According to security camera footage, the pair cased the shop for about ten minutes, looking at the shop’s wares, acting as if they were customers.
They appeared to be steps away from walking out of the shop, empty-handed, before one of the men turned toward the store’s sunglasses case. The case was accidentally left open by one of the store’s employees, said store manager Tom Tanner.
While one of the thieves distracted employees with questions, blocking sight lines from the registers to the sunglasses case, the second shoved pairs of shades into pants and jacket. He appeared to leave the shop multiple times to empty his pockets before returning to steal another handful.
The two men appeared to repeat the process five times, clearing out nearly half of a case before finally leaving the shop 45 minutes later.
By time the thieves left the store, Dive N Surf lost 42 pairs of Maui Jim sunglasses, worth between $200 and $250 each, at a cost of $10,000 to Dive N’ Surf.
According to Tanner, who has been with the store since Oct. 2013, Dive N Surf formerly had a reputation as an easy mark for teenagers who were looking to sneak swimsuits out under their clothes, leaving ripped-off price tags behind in the store’s changing rooms.
That practice dropped off when the store introduced alarm-triggering sensor tags to their inventory more than two months ago. “I don’t even want to think about how much we were losing before that,” Tanner said.
Since the shop’s sunglasses were meant to be locked inside a case, they were not among the products tagged.
The shop’s only saving grace is that one of the thieves happened to glance directly into the camera facing the sunglasses case.
“He knew right where to look,” Tanner said.
“We’ve been open for 62 years now, so we’ve been broken into before, but this is a pretty substantial one,” said Dive N Surf owner Robbie Meistrell. “I don’t think the general public understands that, if I bring ten items in and someone steals one of them, that’s my entire profit margin — I lose money off of that.”
“We’re a small business. We’ve been here a long time, serving our community, and people come in and want to get things for free. We want to put an end to it. It’s not just a problem for us — everybody gets hit, it’s just a matter of how much you get hit,” Miestrell said.
Dive N Surf is offering a $1,000 reward to anyone with information leading to the arrest of the thieves. The Redondo Beach Police Department asks that anyone who may be able to help identify the suspected shoplifters contact Det. Delvin Delrey at 310-379-2477, ext. 2317.
