ROBIN HOOD IN THE YARN SHOP?

I don't knit, but apparently 36 million other people do.

That's according to Alice Fixx, director of communications for the Gastonia, N.C.-based Craft Yarn Council, which tracks such things. Those 36million people account for roughly $800 million a year in yarn sales from the 3,000 independent yarn stores around the country. It's a boom industry whose growth shows no signs of abating.

One of my readers from Santa Barbara, Calif., is an avid knitter. She buys her yarn from her local craft store, and the store's policy had always been to give refunds on unused skeins of yarn. After a recent change in the store's ownership, however, she was told that yarn could no longer be returned for credit.

"I was buying more yarn," she writes, "so I quietly slipped two new skeins into the bag with the two old skeins, and paid for six instead of eight skeins."

By putting two new skeins in with the bag of yarn she had brought from home, hoping to exchange them, she effectively shoplifted those two skeins.

"This was probably illegal," she writes. "Was it also unethical?"

Again, I'm no knitter, but it doesn't take a knitter to know when someone has dropped an ethical stitch.

In slipping two skeins into her bag and walking out without paying for them, my reader was guilty of shoplifting. There's no "probably" about the legality of it. Good rule of thumb: It's illegal to steal stuff from stores.

But her question about whether it was also unethical raises an intriguing point. If she decided that the new owner's change of policy was unfair to her, since she had purchased the yarn with the understanding that it was returnable, could she justify her actions as setting right what the owner had put amiss? Could hers have been an act of civil disobedience designed to correct the imperious rules thrust upon unwitting knitters by an unexpected change of ownership?

Hardly. Such a justification would also make it OK to slip an extra book into your satchel when you're at the bookstore, since the store has raised its prices and the title you had planned to buy is now more expensive. Why not take matters into your own hands to make up the difference?

Because it's stealing. That's why not.

In the famous Heinz dilemma, posed by psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg, a husband must decide whether to break into a drugstore to steal a medicine that could save his wife, assuming that he cannot afford the exorbitant price the druggist is charging. With his wife's life at stake, the husband steals the drug.

Heinz's action can be defended on the grounds that the magnitude of saving someone's life justifies even a willingness to break the law if it's the only way to do so. There is no corollary in the knitting world, however. Knitting may be a popular hobby and its devotees may be passionate about it, but there is no moral justification for stealing yarn simply because you're unhappy with a change in the store's policies.

It was reasonable for my reader to ask the store's new owner to honor the returns policy that was in place when she bought the yarn. Once the new owner refused to stray from his new policy, however, the right thing would have been for her to pay for any yarn she took out of the store.

If she doesn't like the store's new policy, the answer is not to steal from the store. Instead she should take her business to any one of the other 2,999 independent yarn stores in the United States that has a policy more to her liking.