Last week, during his shift overseeing the self-scan section of a large supermarket in London, James let a woman walk out with three multipacks of children’s yoghurts. He had randomly checked her shopping and found that among the items she hadn’t scanned and paid for were the yoghurts, as well as some pouches of baby food. He felt horrible, he says, to have quickly run through his own judgments of how “worthy” he considered her to be – that she was young and had three children under five with her, that she was holding Healthy Start vouchers, which allow people on universal credit and other benefits to buy nutritious food, that the rest of her shopping was healthy with no junk food or alcohol, and that she was really embarrassed and upset. “I couldn’t bring myself to take these four or five items off her so I let it go,” he says. “It wasn’t a huge loss to the company. It wasn’t like they were luxury items. I just said: ‘Don’t worry, but next time someone else might not let it slide.’” He knows he could have been sacked for it. “I’d just have to feign ignorance or stupidity if I got caught.”
At another supermarket, in a town across the country, Alexander watched as a young couple found they couldn’t pay for their shopping at a checkout close to his. They had spent more than £100, paid for some of it in cash, and tried to put the rest on a credit card – not unusual, he says, but the card was declined. “For the next half an hour, they took over the checkout, which we had to close, and somebody had to stand with them while they were making phone calls, presumably to locate some money or fix a problem with the card,” he says. The woman, who was pregnant, was getting more and more distressed and broke down in tears. “It was sad to see. If a credit card doesn’t work, most people have another card, but clearly they had no means of paying.” Eventually they left without half of their shopping.
