Elizabeth* earns circa £80k a year working for an asset management company in the City. And just recently, she stole a leg of lamb worth £42 from Sainsbury’s.
“My husband will sometimes flip out at the Sainsbury’s bill, so I knew he’d be happy if I got the lamb for free, essentially,” she says. “I maybe felt slightly bad about the lamb, because that’s a higher price bracket than I’d usually go for. I’m normally more of a low-brow fruit and veg thief, I guess.”
Indeed, Elizabeth says that pretty much every time she goes shopping she comes out having not paid for some items. “My rule is – and it only applies to supermarkets, I don’t do it anywhere else – if it doesn’t scan properly then I’m not going to bring it up. That’s down to Sainsbury’s or whoever – there’s an issue with their tech. I’m packing my bag, it’s not beeped, no one’s checked it, therefore I’ve taken the leg of lamb.
“You know how you now have to go and weigh fruit and veg and then stick a label on them? I don’t do that either. If I’m just getting one lime or one onion, I’m not doing extra admin for it, that’s going in the bag.”
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Meanwhile, Aaron* works in TV, earns “in the mid-forties”, and says he steals from supermarkets “fairly regularly”. Like Elizabeth, he was keen to point out he only does this when shopping at a major retailer. “I’d never do it from a small, independent store,” he says. “But I feel like it’s different with the big guys. They’re pretty unscrupulous operators at times, so I don’t feel bad on them, in fact I’m pretty anti-supermarket overall. Even though I earn a relatively decent wage, that doesn’t mean that money isn’t a bit tight at times, and saving six quid on a £20 shop makes a difference.”
According to the BRC’s 2024 Crime Survey, losses from customer theft now cost retailers £1.8bn per year. And both of our anonymous sources say they’d never considered shoplifting before the introduction of self-checkouts and self-scan technology. “I only started doing this when I realised how easy it is with self-checkouts now – and the fact that my appearance means I’m not the type of person they’re profiling,” says Aaron.
Matt Hopkins, an associate professor in criminology at the University of Leicester, says that most middle-class shoplifters employ ‘techniques of neutralisation’, which are “rationalisations for behaviours that violate social norms in some way. In this case, you go into a supermarket and then you pay for your stuff. It’s what we’ve always done. But the self-checkout machines, they do create this opportunity. And the retailers are not off the hook here, they’ve rolled this out maybe without properly thinking about it.”
Elizabeth shares Aaron’s perception that she can act with relative impunity. “I’m not really worried about getting, because I’d just play dumb. If there was more of a feeling there’d be a repercussion, that would be a deterrent,” she says.
Hopkins is not surprised to hear this and thinks that changing perceptions around the level of risk involved and about shoplifting generally is crucial for retailers.
“There’s this perception around petty pilfering, it’s a bit like minor motoring offences, that it’s ‘not a real crime’. Well, actually, it is. There is a definite piece around reminding people that this is a proper crime and there are consequences. You can do that through signage in self-checkout areas. ‘Are you thinking of not paying for that? That’s an offence.’ There is some limited evidence in the crime prevention literature that signage does actually work. If they see signage at the appropriate times, it does make people think and it modifies behaviour.”
*Names have been changed
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