AN EAST-WEST THING.(employees in the New York City Saks Fifth Avenue store comment on Winona Ryder's activies in the Beverly Hills branch )

It may take decades for historians to produce a satisfactory analysis of the Winona Ryder shoplifting trial. As the world now knows, a jury in Beverly Hills recently convicted Ryder of two felony counts relating to her attempted theft of $5,560.40 worth of goods from Saks Fifth Avenue there last December 12th. The case has also attracted scrutiny at Saks' flagship store, across from Rockefeller Center, in Manhattan, and the verdict there seems harsh as well--though the East Coast Saks employees reserve their strictest disapprobation for their counterparts on the Beverly Hills sales floor.

On a recent slow morning in the Fifth Avenue store, the Ryder case was a popular topic of discussion. "Did you see that video?" one saleswoman asked, referring to the surveillance tape that was a key exhibit in the trial. In it, the diminutive Ryder is seen hauling armloads of clothes around the store. "Where are the salespeople? Why wasn't she being helped? That would never happen here." The Fifth Avenue store has a similar video setup--"It's like a Vegas casino in here," another saleswoman said--but the New York salespeople insist that they handle themselves with more class than their colleagues in California seemed to. "You can't let someone walk around the store with all those clothes," one said. "You don't want to make a scene or make anyone uncomfortable, but they were just asking for trouble." Another Saks employee pointed to the Sensormatic electronic tags affixed to most of the merchandise in the New York store. In the dressing room of the Beverly Hills store, Ryder apparently used a pair of scissors to clip these tags off the things she wanted to steal. "You couldn't cut our tags off with scissors," the employee said. "Our tags are too tough."

No one at Saks could remember a shoplifter offering up a New York version of Ryder's Method-acting defense to the store security officials who caught her. (According to a security guard, she claimed that she was preparing for a role as a kleptomaniac.) But sales associates had other shoplifting tales. "When the men's department was on the first floor, we would have people walk in, grab an armful of ties, and just bolt for the door," one salesman recalled. (Two years ago, menswear moved to six.) Another salesman ...