My boyfriend got a civil demand letter what's it mean?

I'm not going to be the one to advise you not to pay this. Instead I suggest you do a good Google search on the subject. The shoplifting incident did cause a distraction to the staff at the store and may have made the items taken unsaleable. If so the store has had an unnecessary expense and is attempting to recover some of these expenses.. You will get a better picture when you do the Google search.

The best help we can offer is to tell you to get a new boyfriend. Delete this one from your life. And DO NOT spend money to bail the next one out under ANY circumstances.

I'll try to help you understand. When a shoplifter goes to COURT, after being arrested and charged, the thief usually has to pay a fine (usually in the low hundreds of dollars). That money goes to the state, not to victim (the store he stole from). The victim of the theft gets nothing. Shoplifting has become such a problem that stores have had to install cameras and anti-theft devices and hire security personnel to keep their losses down. All that costs MONEY. And when the shoplifters are prosecuted, they get nothing back, except merchandise they can't sell immediately because it's now evidence. So in most of the 50 states, laws have now been passed to allow the merchants to sue the thieves for money, to offset the costs of their anti-theft measures. In some states they're allowed to ask for up to ten times the value of the merchandise that was stolen, just to make up for their time & trouble.This is a better thing than passing the cost onto the consumer, isn't it? Making the thieves pay for it themselves, instead of the innocent? So your boyfriend is really lucky that they're only asking for $300. It could have been $1750. He'd better pay it, too, or whatever he has in the way of a credit rating will be ruined with a bad debt. By the way, he's an adult, so this will be on his criminal record forever and will ruin any chance of a job in retail, finance, security, or medical. The military won't want him either. He has one chance to keep this off his record, and that's if the judge is merciful enough to offer him a diversion program. Paying this civil demand will be one of the conditions of the diversion program.

It means you should get your $100 back and run as fast as you can from this loser. Not only he is so stupid that he thinks he can just walk into a store and walk away with their stuff. No, that's not bad enough, he has to pick a freakin' Walmart, the store with the cheapest crap merchandise. I f that was not stupid enough, the loser gets caught doing it. So why are you hanging out with a genius like this. Can't you find somebody who can actually earn money by working? Is your life so boring that you have to take on this loser's problems? Do you really think you are going save him from himself and reform him?