The original title of the film, Manbiki Kazoku, literally translates as Shoplifting Family.
Nobuyo wears a shirt with a Martin Luther King Jr. quotation: "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. "
Director Hirokazu Koreeda said that he developed the story for Shoplifters when considering his earlier film Like Father, Like Son (2013), with the question "what makes a family"? He had been considering a film exploring this question for years before making Shoplifters. Koreeda described it as his "socially conscious" film. With this story, Koreeda said he did not want the perspective to be from only a few individual characters, but to capture "the family within the society", a "wide point of view" in the vein of his 2004 film Nobody Knows (2004). He set his story in Tokyo and was also influenced by the Japanese Recession, including media reports of how people lived in poverty and of shoplifting.
To research the project, Hirokazu Koreeda toured an orphanage and wrote a scene inspired by a girl there who read from Swimmy by Leo Lionni.