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I Walked Out With a £150 Trolley – It Was So Easy: The Rise of Middle-Class Shoplifting

Thefts from shops have hit a record high in UK – but it’s the affluent among us who might be to blame

BBC 27 NOV 2023

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Marks & Spencers’ chairman Archie Norman this week confirmed that Britain is indeed now a nation of shoplifters, laying much of the blame at the feet of the middle classes...

“It’s too easy to say it’s a cost of living problem,” said Norman. “Some of this shoplifting is gangs. Then you get the middle class. With the reduction of service you get in a lot of shops now, some people think, ‘This didn’t scan properly, 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.’”

Last month, shoplifting hit a record high of 1,000 offences a day, with shopkeepers complaining about police inaction.

Yvette, a 48-year-old NHS worker and mother of two from north London, joined the ranks of unlikely, middle-class shoplifters this summer, at the end of a perfectly innocent weekly shop in her local supermarket.

“It was my first time trying the ‘scan-as-you-shop’ facility,” she says, referring to the system in which supermarket customers use a handheld device to scan their groceries as they go, before heading to a dedicated checkout to pay. It’s supposed to be convenient and quick. “There’s no quicker way to shop!” notes Tesco of its version of the scheme.

“I had a trolley full of bread, pasta, orange juice, fruit, some family-sized ready meals, dog food, washing powder – the standard weekly shop,” says Yvette. “I’ve got two hungry, sports-loving teenage girls.

“Dutifully, I scanned each and every item as per the instructions on the handheld scanner. The problem arose when I tried to pay at the till. First, there was a lengthy queue, which was annoying, and then it wouldn’t accept the barcode at the end for me to pay.

“I called for help and waited for assistance, but all the staff seemed to be busy helping in the regular self-scanning queues. No one was manning scan-as-you-shop, and I was getting crosser and crosser as I needed to get to work.”

No wonder some supermarkets are now ditching self-checkouts and scan-as-you shop systems. Tesco, for example, is introducing so-called “magic tills” that deploy a combination of sensors and cameras to track customers as they shop, automatically detecting what they pick up as they go, before presenting them with a bill as they walk out.

Sarah Quiggin, head of store customer experience at Tesco, said the innovation was “about cutting out some of the challenges around scanning… the issues with certain barcodes and products… that customers get frustrated about, understandably”.