'I'm amazed at attempts to steal shopping at supermarket scan-as-you-go tills'
I’ve stopped using scan-as-you go at the supermarket because it’s so much slower than queueing at the old tills.
There’s only ever one assistant on hand to check if you are old enough to buy that bottle of Chardonnay or haven’t slipped an extra pack of paracetamol in your trolley. And when you get the “random” but now increasingly routine check they have to re-scan TEN different items, pulling them from the depths of your perfectly-packed bags.
I always feel guilty at this point, terrified that I’ve accidentally missed an avocado or weighed the wrong variety of apples. Because I’m scarred by the shame and humiliation of my one attempt at shoplifting in 1976.
I was 12 and my cousin and I each nicked a blue eyeshadow and some hair bobbles from Woolworths. But my mum found out and marched us straight back down to Woolies to apologise and return them. We also got a lecture on “the slippery slope to crime” from the terrifying store detective and were grounded without pocket money for a month.
It’s a shame more people didn’t have the same wake-up call. Because I’m constantly amazed by the number of customers I see trying to brazen out their obvious attempts to steal their shopping at the scan-as-you-go.
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And it’s nearly always the smart, middle-class folk who simply “forgot” to zap those bottles of Chardonnay while they browsed the other white wines. Silly them! Or insisting there must be a problem with the barcodes on that side of salmon that didn’t go through.
But while discussing this with a rather well-to-do acquaintance at a party the other day I was shocked when she said: “Oh, come now, dear, we’ve all done it occasionally, haven’t we?” Erm, no. This week one posh newspaper actually carried a feature where three anonymous writers confessed to being regular shoplifters. “So far I’ve only defrauded the big players like Waitrose,” wrote one.
Another bragged: “I have decided that ‘stealing’ means ‘restorative justice for sloppy service’.” And the third spoke of the “etiquette” of stealing and the many friends “entering their avocados as apples at the self-checkout at Tesco so that they are cheaper. Their outrage is with Tesco, which is too mean to pay for humans to run tills.”
Britain is currently in the grip of a shoplifting epidemic costing retailers almost £1billion a year. The British Retail Consortium says there were eight million thefts in the 12 months to March but police recorded only 339,206.
And just 48,218 incidents resulted in charges – because a Tory law-change in 2014 saw the theft of goods worth less than £200 downgraded to a minor offence punishable by a postal fine. Smaller retailers are obviously hardest-hit and 87% of shop staff have faced violence and abuse.
But while the cost-of-living crisis has undoubtedly fuelled this crime wave with people stealing to feed their families, they are not the only culprits. It’s people who think they’re too posh to pay who really need a wake-up call. So let’s reverse that law, get tough on ALL shoplifters and make the middle-class pilferers pay.
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