TM Eye is a company that hires former detectives, most of whom wear a uniform, some of whom are in plain clothes, to mingle with shoppers. In many respects, then, they’re a lot like a police force – except for the bit where they investigate shoplifting. They were called in by a benighted M&S, which had lost £500 worth of steak and many bottles of prosecco, and found the suspect relatively easily, with the aid of some cutting-edge technology known as CCTV. The regular police had declined to investigate, though have not so far been drawn on whether that’s because they are under-resourced or the pilfering scene is just too well-populated.
There are currently 30,000 thefts from shops a day in the UK, and the British Retail Consortium estimated that it cost the sector £953m last year. Even if you take with a pinch of salt the narrative that these thefts are mainly committed by criminal gangs and suspect the cost of living crisis has a lot to do with it, you can still see the problem if shoplifting is effectively decriminalised: it’s a major degradation of the civic sphere if supermarket employees aren’t safe at work, and they can’t take the risk of putting meat on the shelves. This is where we are: if you want law and order, you have to buy it.
