A man leaves a north London branch of Aldi carrying two bags of groceries that he did not pay for. He hadn’t planned to steal, but after becoming exasperated with the slowness of staff attending to the various glitches and alarms of the self-checkout system, and assuming it would go unnoticed, decides to just walk out the door.
He crosses the road and heads towards home. It’s a busy part of town and this kind of thing happens all the time. He doubts anyone in the store even noticed. But a voice calls after him, a security guard has given chase. The man, slightly panicked, doubles down and quickens his pace, pretending not to hear, but the guard keeps shouting, pleading for him to stop. In an attempt to lose his pursuer, the man ducks into a newsagent. The security guard enters, finds the man pretending to browse the fountain pens, and challenges him. “Sir, you didn’t pay for that shopping.”
The man is what criminologist Professor Emmeline Taylor calls a “Swiper”, a Seemingly Well-Intentioned Patron Engaging in Regular shoplifting. But he’s probably more of an opportunist than a regular offender. I know because he’s a friend of mine. Someone I consider to be kind, thoughtful and, for the most part, law-abiding. But the same can be said for people across the country and that hasn’t stopped national shoplifting stats soaring.
According to the Office for National Statistics, 2023 was the worst year on record for shoplifting, with more than 430,000 cases recorded, an increase of more than a third from the year before. But that is probably just a fraction of the real number. The British Retail Consortium – the body representing almost all of the major retail chains, incorporating food and drink, fashion, DIY, health and beauty and more – recently reported that incidents of customer theft more than doubled from 8m to 16.7m in the period between 1 September 2022 and 31 August 2023. Losses reached £1.8bn, up from £950m the year before.
The Co-op alone recorded 330,000 incidents of shoplifting, abuse, violence and antisocial behaviour in its 2,500+ stores across the UK in 2023, a 44% increase on the year before. The company, one of the most vocal on the subject (which it can be as a co-operative, knowing there are no share prices at risk), recently published a report titled Stealing with Impunity, which attempted to encapsulate the impact the rise in shoplifting is having on the business. In the introduction, Paul Gerrard, the Co-op’s director of public affairs, described a state of “lawlessness on the UK high street that has never been seen before”
Over the phone, Gerrard paints a broader, more compassionate picture. Stealing to provide for oneself has always happened, he says, remarkably so “for a country as rich as ours. But what’s behind the 44% rise is not people stealing for themselves, but people stealing on a large scale to resell to people struggling to make ends meet.”
The cost of living crisis, directly or indirectly, is the driving force of the UK’s shoplifting epidemic. Taylor, who hosts the Retail Crime Uncovered podcast and wrote the report for the Co-op, divides culprits into three categories.
First, there are organised criminals moving from county to county picking targets and stealing in bulk to sell at a reduced price. Easy pickings, says Taylor: “Why risk the penalties of drug trafficking when you can just go and target companies up and down the country?” Second are the “local prolifics”, repeat offenders who target the same stores over and over again. Often, either under duress or on commission, thieves work for a middle-man – a fence – who acts as a kind of discount boutique for the community. “We’re seeing markets for really boring, mundane products,” says Taylor. “People don’t want to waste hard-earned cash buying things like laundry detergent or coffee.”
A 2018 report by the Centre for Social Justice stated that dependencies on heroin, crack cocaine and psychoactive substances drive 70% of all retail theft in the UK, and Taylor says the bulk of these prolific offenders are vulnerable, be it through substance abuse, extreme poverty or poor mental health.
Finally, there are the opportunists, the Swipers. M&S chairman and former Conservative shadow minister Archie Norman recently said he believes it’s these people driving the overall spike, not necessarily the gangs or the repeat offenders. In November, he told the LBC podcast, Money with David Buik and Michael Wilson, that “it’s just too easy to say it’s a cost of living problem”, and that the real culprits are the impatient middle classes, too entitled to suffer self-service technology. “A lot of people go in and think, ‘Well this didn’t scan or it’s very difficult to scan these things through and I shop here all the time, it’s not my fault, I’m owed it,’” he said.
A few weeks ago, I started asking people, in confidence, what they thought about shoplifting, why they think there’s more of it and whether they do it themselves. I wanted to get a sense of where it sits on the spectrum of transgression. Is it, for example, worse than jumping a red light on a bicycle, but more palatable than graffiti? Do people think it’s victimless and how have those that work on retail’s frontline had to adjust? And is it all about getting more for less, or has a new sense of apathetic abandon drifted into the national psyche?
Some people, I learned, shoplift to put food on the table and some do it out of a sense of duty to stick it to the man. Some do it out of principle, balking at the prices. And some do it because the world feels too big and out of control, because they can’t buy a house or start a pension and leaving Waitrose with the weekend paper under their arm gives them a sense of agency, misguided as it may be. Many, I’m happy to report, don’t do it at all.
“I used to do it more for a thrill, now I’m doing it for a practical purpose,” says a man I speak to in Cornwall, who tells me his mortgage repayments are about to double. He doesn’t consider himself a prolific offender nor does he steal in bulk, but in order to feed himself and his two children, he supplements the weekly shop with things he doesn’t pay for. Cheese, for example, or meat. “All the sugary products are super-cheap,” he says, “and anything with fewer ingredients is more expensive, which is nonsense.”
The man doesn’t steal via the self-checkouts. “There’s more of a risk there,” he says. He fills a bag as he shops and, when he gets to the cashier, he simply leaves a few pieces inside. “I don’t walk out and feel guilty about it,” he says. “For me, the people working there aren’t affected. I’m just eating into the massive profits they’re making.”
That sense of rebellion is echoed by almost every person I speak to. A tech-industry manager tells me that the “corporate mentality” for increasing profits, raising prices well above inflation and not caring how it affects people, “has never seemed more prevalent than it is now. I see the supermarkets as victims, but I don’t give a shit,” he continues, saying that he doesn’t always scan everything at the self-checkout, but only ever at M&S, where he believes the scales are less sensitive. “They don’t care about us. And this is a very, very minor way, probably not even noticeable, to get back at them.”
“It’s all part of a mentality of feeling like you’re being screwed and that you’re a commodity,” a Gen Z arts industry man tells me. He says he often pilfers from supermarkets and even airport duty-free lounges, which are especially good for cosmetics.
I meet three students smoking a joint in London’s Hyde Park and ask them about their criminal activity, assuming, given the context, that they’re all up for a little light shoplifting. They’re not, it seems, until one eventually admits that he didn’t pay for the jacket he’s wearing. “I went to buy my mum a birthday present,” he remembers, “and it was quite expensive, so I took this to make up for it.”
The psychology of shoplifting is hard to pin down. Emmeline Taylor describes how acquisitive crime can be pleasurable. “You get a physiological response,” she says. “A feeling of anxiety is suddenly rewarded with a slush of dopamine and pleasure.”
Taylor also points to the mental health crisis and how engaging in shoplifting can represent a cry for help, especially among women. Around 85% of people arrested are men and only 4% of the prison population is made up of women, but of the 19,900 defendants prosecuted for shop theft in 2021, 28% were women.
What about the role of politics, climate change, Brexit, global conflict and a dodgy economy? Might they somehow correlate with the rise in shop theft? Taylor says there could be a link, but it’s unquantifiable. “It’s really hard to articulate, but there’s almost been a loss of trust in the structures and institutions of society.” She points to the government’s lockdown rule-breaking as an example. “I think that trickles down,” she says. “People ask: ‘Why should we be bound by social convention if our government is not?’”
Professor Jason Roach, a criminologist at Huddersfield University, isn’t so sure. “Do people going in to nick a jar of coffee really think about the state of the world?” he asks. “No.” He argues that the young man’s theft of the jacket was not necessarily down to the many ills of society, perhaps the young man wanted the jacket and rationalised the theft by buying a present for his mum at the same time.
Roach and Taylor both highlight the role of social media, especially on young people, on whom, says Roach, the “pressure to conform and have the latest stuff is even greater than before”. Last year, several hundred young people stormed London’s Oxford Street to carry out daylight smash-and-grab raids on stores after allegedly organising them on TikTok. “These are people who don’t know each other,” says Taylor, “coming together on a shared platform and thinking, ‘Yeah, I want to be part of that.’”
On Oxford Street, Europe’s busiest shopping destination, the security guard of a global high-street fashion store tells me that in his four years on the job, shoplifting frequency has only increased. Last week, he says, he caught a guy trying to steal £700-worth of clothing, using a special pin to remove the electronic tags.
A guard from another store nearby tells me that his team catches three or four shoplifters a day, but find scores of discarded tags around the store and by then it’s too late. Even if they see someone stealing, they might not get involved.
“Every retailer in the country that I know has a policy for staff that says, ‘Don’t intervene,’” says the Co-op’s Paul Gerrard. “When colleagues try to intervene, that’s when they get hurt.”
I ask the guard if he feels safe and he says no – he has to wear a stab vest, of course he isn’t safe. He tells me that in his first few weeks as a guard, when he was working at a different branch, a group of 10 to 15 teenagers stormed the store twice in the same week in two 15-second smash-and-grab raids. “The second time, I had another security guard with me who tried to close the door,” he says, “but he couldn’t and one jumped in. He took 11 or 12 jackets, I grabbed him and put him on the floor and we started fighting. An actual fight.”
I ask both security guards when and how the police get involved and they both laugh. The first guard told me that he called the police just before 6pm the other day and they called him back five hours later, when he was home in bed. The other said it’s just a faster process if they don’t get the police involved at all.
If you’re caught shoplifting on Oxford Street, or at any big store, you are likely to be taken by security to a detention room and searched. You’ll have your picture taken, be banned from the store, maybe even the whole street and then the police (or your parents, if you’re under 18) will be called to intervene. Failing that, you’ll be escorted to the nearest train station. But there’s nothing stopping you coming back the next day.
Gerrard notes that in the first quarter of 2023, police didn’t turn up to seven out of 10 incidents at the Co-op and, bafflingly, says that even when staff had managed to detain an offender, the police attended even less. “The response from offenders is often, ‘Ring the police, they’re not going to come,’” he says.
Speaking last month, in a different interview with LBC, Archie Norman concurred. “We get very little help from the police,” he said. “I think we have to accept that police are not interested in this sort of crime any more, whether we like it or not.”
Since last October, when the National Police Chiefs’ Council introduced a new retail crime action plan, there has been a shift. Gerrard says that police are now attending six out of every 10 incidents at the Co-op. The plan states that officers are obliged to attend an incident if it involves a prolific and known offender, if there’s violence and if they have been detained by staff. “But it’s still very much caveated by, if something of higher priority comes in, then you’re going to have to wait,” says Taylor.
New legislation will make it a standalone offence to assault a retail worker, carrying a maximum sentence of six months in prison and repeat shoplifting offenders could be electronically tagged. However, since the Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, so-called “low value” shoplifting – anything under a value of £200 – is punished as a Summary Offence, which will usually only result in a postal fine. Just like a speeding ticket.
Last month, Chris Philp, minister for Crime, Policing and Fire, said: “To the shoplifters and those abusing shopworkers, enough is enough.” However, statistically, shoplifting is all but decriminalised in the UK: 70% of investigations into the 430,000+ reported incidents in 2023 were closed with no person identified. That means only around 129,000 of the estimated 16.7m incidents were brought to justice – less than 1%.
In the end, my friend, the one with the two bags of shopping from Aldi, saw sense. He snapped out of whatever urge sent him into a life of crime, followed the guard back to the store and paid in full. Perhaps there is hope for us. Perhaps it’s a sign that the fever is breaking. Or perhaps it was just his bad luck to get caught.
