In the radical rise of shoplifting, during which retailers have been forced to hire private armies and stock their shelves with decoy versions of the pricier goods, a crime-driver besides gangs and the cost of living crisis has been observed: the middle-class crim who shoplifts with a sense of entitlement. The chair of Marks & Spencer, Archie Norman, described the attitude of some customers to self-checkouts: “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.” The criminologist Emmeline Taylor said: “They won’t think of themselves as criminals; they will think they’ve cheated the system [and] the big retailers are the real criminals.” Add to this self-righteousness and a growing appreciation of the thrill of theft, and the trend could really get out of hand.
There is something else, though. I interviewed the actor Stockard Channing once and she described some career doldrums with the elegant line: “I couldn’t get arrested.” It floats back to me sometimes, because I now honestly believe I couldn’t get arrested. Nobody checks my bag at bag checks. When there is an unidentified item in the bagging area (not because I’m shoplifting, but because self-checkouts do not, in fact, work that well), the assistant will wave it through without a glance.
It’s not just theft I could get away with. I’ve vaped in the House of Commons, goddammit. There is an assumption of middle-class probity and obedience, mingled with a whole load of assumptions about middle-aged white women. We are thought to exist at the high point of prosocial behaviour, and also to be quite bossy, so full-time engaged in telling other people off that we would never need to be told off or monitored in any way. All of which is incredibly irritating, the classism in particular, but also that perceptible assault on your personhood, when you notice you’ve been homogenised into a type who would never have anything dangerous in her bag, and can’t possibly be vaping, she must just be emitting clouds of vapour because of the menopause or something.
I don’t blame the security guards, by the way. Most likely I blame, through some casuistic reasoning, the big retailers – which will in no way lead me into shoplifting-temptation, but realistically, who’s going to check?
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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