CHECK IT OUT: Elissa Drassinower retrieves wallet from stroller.
‘COVERUP’
She places her purchased groceries on top of unpaid items.
Supermarket surveillance video casts doubt on an Upper East Side mom’s claim that she intended to pay for — but forgot — the milk and beer she stored under her baby’s stroller, Fairway’s CEO said yesterday.
Footage from the checkout line, which was viewed by The Post, shows Elissa Drassinower retrieving her wallet from the same stroller basket where she had stored the items in question, said CEO Howard Glickberg.
And after buying $50 in groceries — including expensive cheeses — she is seen on the video reaching into the underneath-stroller basket a second time to place the plastic bags directly on top of the half-gallon of milk, six-pack of beer and Red Bull she never paid for and says she didn’t see.
“She would have to be pretty oblivious to not see what she did,” Glickberg said. “The security video clearly shows that she sees the products after she’s checked out.”
But Drassinower stands by her story — that she had completely forgotten the items were there.
Of the store’s move to ban her for life, “It was a harsh penalty for a mistake that could have happened to any parent,” Drassinower said.
While Glickberg said he cannot know for certain whether Drassinower meant to steal, he contends that her actual motivation is irrelevant.
Fairway has banned “several hundred” customers for pilfering groceries, and, “it doesn’t matter if “somebody is shoplifting intentionally or not,” he said.
“We cannot discriminate and say one person can’t come back and the next person can come back.”
In Drassinower’s case, “If we wanted to, we could have pressed charges,” he added.
Drassinower is not alone.
New Yorker Meredith Paley said the same thing happened to her nanny a year ago at the Upper West Side Fairway, when the caregiver failed to pay for a single mango left in the stroller.
“They said they watched her security tape and that she looked in the stroller and ‘pretended’ not to see the mango,” Paley said. “Why would she steal a mango that I was paying for and asked her to buy?”
She lobbied for nearly a year to get the ban lifted until the store finally acquiesced.