Anything Goes

The British middle-classes discover a hip new trend: shoplifting.

Woman in the Garden by Claude Monet (1867)

The problem with living in a town of six thousand is the distinct lack of a dynamic, thriving criminal underclass and the ready availability of stolen goods.

Have you seen the price of olive oil? At an obscene £8.50 a litre, many of my fellow gourmands have turned to a cheaper, albeit more excitable alternative—crack cocaine. They say it's moreish.

Last year's scorching European summer drove olive oil prices upwards by some eighty percent. 'Market forces!' proclaim toadyish, wearisome masochists crunching down dry, sad leaves.

A gander at my local supermarket's shelves provokes the latent shoplifter burrowed in my skull. Behind velvet ropes, flanked by anabolic meatheads dripping with adolescent wounds, sit gleaming bottles of Filippo Berio extra virgin olive oil.

When I get too close, the guards assert their dominance: "Fuck off, peasant. The canola oil is on the pauper aisle next to the Cheerios."

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Over the hills and into the city, supply and demand work their magic.

I used to frequent a pub which welcomed a more 'authentic' clientele.

This pub, the kind which printed mugshots of wayward patrons who'd somehow violated anarchical pub rules, was a freeport for the city's thriving black economy. There, the usual strictures of commerce did not apply.

On a good day, underclass entrepreneurs would march through the door. Groaning under their track-marked, withering arms were triumphant, foil-lined sacks.

What followed was a Turkish bazaar of low-level criminality. A snaggle-toothed crim, deep forehead lines betraying his thirty years, would reel off like a Sotheby's auctioneer.

"We got steaks—three for a fiver. Them razors is seven quid. The vodka's six quid a throw. We got cheese. Loadsa cheese."

These 'smurfs' as I think the slang went, flooded the pub in steaks, cheese, razors, vodka, whiskey, gin, scratchcards, perfumes, lipsticks, nappies, Calpol, washing detergent, batteries—anything marked 'security protected.'

Without quite knowing it, these crack-and-smack-addled boys had prefigured billion-dollar companies such as Deliveroo, Door Dash, Hello Fresh. But rather than buy, sell, and skim off the top, they swiped, stole and slung for a crisp one hundred percent profit.

These industrious fellows offered a bespoke service. You could put in a request for, say, a Waterman fountain pen, and your goods would arrive hours later. Sensing an impulse buy down the line, the particularly enterprising would pilfer a few stacks of Waterman ink cartridges.

"How come the alarms don't go off?" I'd ask.

The professional loved to explain the tricks of his trade:

"We lines the bag with tin foil, you see."

The work of a diligent seamstress, the sensor-blocking foil neatly lined the sack.

"Never fails," he'd smirk.

These characters came from the parts of town where the locals long ago ran out of luck. But feckless and stupid, they were not.

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It's natural to justify such illicit purchases to oneself. In 'Umbrella Morals,' A.G. Gardiner explains that the law-abider who swaps a cheap umbrella for a more luxurious one at the barbershop would never think of pickpocketing.

This self-justification was easily digestible in the company of the thieves. These characters espoused a street-level Marxism. Growing up at the bottom, consideration is weakness. Another's gain is one's personal loss.

"They makes billions whilst some other poor bastard goes starving," was a typical statement. Nodding along, I'd ignore such fragile arguments.

"They bailed out the bankers," I'd scoff, whilst admiring the illicit beauty of my fine-nib half-price Waterman Hemisphere. "Fuck 'em," I'd add, shamelessly clipping the 'Th' sound to smooth over rough, class-ridden edges.

The term, 'They,' is a catch-all for the forces who plot against and corrode our better selves. That mythical beast authors almost all universal hardship. If only we could uncover who they are, we’d live in Elysium.

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In our post-pandemic crack-up, the language of the criminal fringe is now the argot of the allegedly well-to-do.

Britain is a land in which Tesco staff wear bodycams to record shoplifters and discourage threats and assaults on wearied, underpaid staff. Such incidents, including threats with knives and hammers, have doubled since the pandemic.

Last year, the Co-op supermarket noted record levels of shoplifting and antisocial behaviour—nearly 1,000 incidents per day. Police didn't bother to respond to 71 percent of those crimes. Shop thefts have doubled in the past few years—leeching retailers of almost one billion pounds. In 2023, the Association of Convenience stores reported over one million thefts to the police—a record.

According to academics, post-lockdown anomie has authored a wave of antisocial behaviour and crime. In plain English, the pandemic loosened our sense of what's acceptable. We've gone a bit mental.

One cannot set a foot down on the pavement without trampling on what criminologists have dubbed Swipers—Seemingly Well-Intentioned Patrons Engaging in Regular Shoplifting.

The Evening Standard warns of an epidemic of middle-class shoplifting.

Emma, 37, works in public relations. After a long day trafficking in falsehoods and humbug, Emma relaxes with a spot of socially unacceptable dishonesty. She slips smoked salmon, a wedge of brie, and a punnet of blueberries into her tote bag. Emma rings the cheapest items through the self-checkout to not arouse suspicion.

According to the Standard, Emma is one of a swelling number of usually law-abiding citizens who indulge in a spot of five-fingered discount.

In The Times, a Gen Z student offers a meatier account of miscreance.

The anonymous student of a 'Russell Group university' reveals her daily bout of shoplifting. In the middle-class madrassa known as M&S, she routinely purloins wholewheat wraps, mango slices, and kefir. She then pays £2.50 for a coffee at the café before slinking out of the front doors.  

But Ms Anonymous is what we might call an ethical shoplifter. All her mates do the same, she says. And they adhere to a 'doctrine'. She never steals from independent shops, nor does she nab anything over a tenner.

Ms Anonymous says she's sticking up two fingers up to the 'powers-that-be.' Shoplifting is her 'vigilante campaign' against the shadowy forces who've 'stolen her generation's future.' Ms Anonymous is, like countless others, fighting a guerrilla war against the illusory entity known as 'They.'

At least she was. At the end of the confessional, (a burgeoning genre here in cracked-up Britain) she breaks character. Perhaps her soupy, proletarian vaudeville proved too much. She confesses: "I shoplift because it's easy, and frankly, as a young white woman, I can get away with it."

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How refreshingly honest in this age of raising awareness, moral gymnastics, hoo-hah and hokum.

All these years, I've justified those characters in the pub as little Davids fighting a corporate Goliath. I've pretended that my desire for a half-priced fountain pen was a small and crucial pebble in David's slingshot.

Such acts of rebellion, I told myself, undermined that shadowy author of universal frustration, ignorance, and want. That author known as ‘they.’

Truthfully, I desired something beautiful for half the price. Who doesn't?

And yet, I sympathise with the thieves. If you've seen the outrageous price they are charging for a bottle of olive oil, you would sympathise, too.

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