Western Europe's economy finds itself in a stealthy crisis

PARIS - Italian supermarkets report an increase in shoplifting by first-time offenders, especially among middle-class and elderly people. The most popular target for rookie thieves: Parmesan cheese.

French shoppers, famously insistent about freshness, no longer snub foods that are close to the expiration dates. Discovering an underground market for almost-expired products fished out of dumpsters, stores decide to keep the spoils on the shelves.

Spanish police detect a shift in car thefts, from luxury brands to the sensible mid-range models now in demand on the black market.

These are the signs of a slow-motion crisis in continental Western Europe. The street-level repercussions of the economic meltdown have been less brutal than in the United States or Eastern Europe because of the strong government-backed social-welfare network in France and its prosperous neighbors.

But experts warn that the safety net is starting to fray as the global crisis persists, unemployment keeps rising and benefits run out.

"France lost 90,000 jobs in January alone, a real dramatic jump, and we haven't felt the impact of that yet because those people will get benefits for a while," said Olivier Berthe, who directs Restos de Coeur, a charity that runs soup kitchens for needy people nationwide. "We get more and more clients, and the worry is that we haven't yet seen all the ones who will be coming."

The charity already has served 12 percent more people in 2009 than during the same period last year. In the rural heartland of France, there has been a sharp increase in demand at soup kitchens as work dries up in agriculture, construction and other sectors.

If the American dream is opportunity, the European dream is equality. Europeans don't grow up believing that anyone can be elected president or build an empire out of a small business. But they trust the state to help make a middle-class lifestyle widely accessible with solid health and education infrastructures, iron-clad labor protections and a generous system for unemployed and poor people.

In France, the percentage of people beneath the poverty line fell steadily in the past 40 years, from 14 percent to 6 percent in 2000. Over the past two years, however, the percentage has risen slightly, Berthe said.

No one is predicting that economic woes will produce riots or the kind of government collapses occurring in Eastern Europe. But the quiet repercussions could get louder if factories and companies continue mass firings or shutdowns, Berthe said.

In Italy, quiet despair has led to a wave of pilfering by unlikely culprits who do not fit the profile of professional shoplifters, said Giuseppe Politi, director of the Italian farmers' association.

Shoplifting increased 7 percent this year compared with the first months of 2008, he said. The trend started with thefts of expensive items, especially Parmesan cheese, then widened.

Italy's economy is not as big as France's. Nonetheless, until recently Italians enjoyed a high-quality lifestyle driven by large and medium industries, thrifty savings habits and a sometimes chaotic but protective social-services system. Moreover, experts say, the meltdown in fall 2008 did not hit Italy as hard as other countries because its banks and businesses were less connected to the global financial sector.

Nonetheless, a survey published by Corriere della Sera newspaper in November found that more than one-third of Italian families have economic problems and their monthly salary only lasts the first three weeks of the month.

In Rome, the clientele has changed at the charity known as Save Mamas, which provides parents with counseling as well as diapers, second-hand children's clothes and powdered milk.

"We started helping mostly foreigners, poor immigrants, but in the last year the number of Italian mothers that come to us increased 25 percent," said Katia Pacello, a psychologist who runs the project.

Spain also avoided the initial effects of the international crisis, but now leaders say it has aggravated the slump of an economy whose twin engines, real estate and construction, ran out of a steam a year or so ago. Unemployment has shot up to 16 percent, twice the average in the European Union.