Again I don't condone this and don't necessarily believe this was the reasoning behind what happened, but no it's not wiser to steal food over luxury goods if your intent is to feed your starving family for the foreseeable future. With one handful you can leave with $10k from that store. This is why they were dragging the purses that were basically fused to the display racks. A single purse might be $3k. So a thousand times the price of a loaf of bread. If you already made the decision that you're stealing to support your family, are you going to want to do it every other day, or are you going to want to grab one purse that feeds your family for a month?