Shoplifting is rife - but amid a relentless cost of living crisis & rising inequality, is it surprising?

These items might seem tedious to some - if you’re going to deploy the five-finger discount, why not aim high and set your sights on the champagne behind the counter? But the reality is that for many people living in that deprived town, these every day items were luxuries - simply unaffordable.

One woman once let it slip to me she had a friend who would shoplift groceries, along with hygiene products like nappies and men’s razors, in bulk and sell them on to her and fellow locals for a more realistic price. I also heard urban legends of a “Dave” who would nab everything you’d need for Christmas dinner, even a whole turkey, on the cheap if you gave him a list.

And that was then, nearly 10 years ago. According to the British Retail Consortium, retail thefts across England and Wales have since drastically increased - soaring by 26% in 2022 alone and leading to a £1bn loss in profits across the board.

Many will dub me a bleeding heart, but I truly believe the majority of shoplifting offences at supermarkets stem from poverty. Many of them stem from addiction, but more often than not that’s a knock-on effect of poverty, is it not?

It’s a vicious cycle, but there’s another set of people I feel for in this sorry affair - and that’s the shop assistants and security guards tasked with confronting thieves. I remember all too well one woman screaming in my face to get “the f*ck away” from her baby as I bent down to quietly retrieve stolen clothes stowed in the bottom of her child’s pram in my previous job at a women’s fashion retailer (that shall remain nameless).

That was jarring enough, but according to Co-op food boss Matt Hood, it now goes beyond verbal abuse and staff often descend on the shopfloor fearing for their lives. The group said it lost a whopping £33 million in “leakage”, which includes theft and fraud, perpetuated by “repeat, prolific offenders and organised criminal gangs” during the first six months of 2023.

“One of the things that makes me most angry is those that claim this is a victimless crime,” said Mr Hood. “It is fundamentally not, as my store colleagues who have been verbally abused, or have had knives or syringes pulled on them, can all vouch for.”

Stores are also having to go to extraordinary lengths to deter shoplifters. There’s the launch of White’s Project Pegasus initiative, which has seen a group of 10 retailers fork out £600,000 to analyse CCTV footage and other data about shoplifting

Waitrose and John Lewis even revealed last month they were offering free coffees to on-duty police officers in order to make thieves “think twice” about stealing goods. Waitrose’s head of security, Nicki Juniper, claims the recent uptake in crime “isn’t driven by a need to put food on the table, but rather professional shoplifters stealing for greed over need”.

That may well be true, but there’s no denying these desperate measures land amid desperate times - namely the cost of living crisis. According to the Food Foundation, a total of 9.3 million adults experienced food insecurity in January 2023, while around 3.2 million adults reported not eating for an entire day because they couldn’t afford it.

This increase in shoplifting cannot be merely coincidence. And rather than demonising every offender, perhaps the focus should be on how we can alleviate socio-economic deprivation and better help the vulnerable and disadvantaged.

One anonymous shop assistant writing in the Guardian sums it up better than I ever will. They say they once chased a man who stole some sausages and later revealed he was “desperately hungry”, and often see old people stealing food as their pension didn’t stretch far enough that week.

They added: “Stealing can never be condoned. But shoplifting is often a symptom of an increasingly unequal society with a more and more threadbare safety net that is failing to catch the most vulnerable. That is the problem we must tackle above all else.”