“You’re not police are you?” says a middle-aged woman in a sparkly jumper eyeing the Guardian suspiciously in a dark alley down the side of a Leeds city centre pub.
She is short, about 5ft 2in, with a sandy coloured bob, a vape pen hanging out of her mouth and a look of high suspicion on her face, which does not diminish during the illicit transaction with three balaclava-clad men.
She surveys the wares on offer – about 20 packets of red meat: mince, chops, Taste the Difference steak with herby butter, three boxes of ribs in barbecue sauce that would normally cost £6.25 each in Sainsbury’s.
The trio want £40 for it all but she haggles and gets the lot, two full carrier bags, for £30. It’s a good deal.
“A very good deal!” says one of the shoplifters, Daniel, as his colleague waves her goodbye and she struggles away with the heavy bags. “She gets well looked after by me I’ll tell you.”
The woman is one of “loads” of ordinary people who are regular black market customers, he says, and they have no problem shifting products within minutes of stealing them.
Today it’s meat but sometimes it’s chocolate, laundry tabs, alcohol – whatever high-value items they can grab from supermarket shelves in the centre of Leeds, the city that was earlier this year revealed as England’s shoplifting capital, recording 2,157 shop thefts in 12 months.
The Guardian visited this spot, one of many dotted across the city centre – some in plain sight – because it is a well-known place shoplifters relieve themselves of the fruits of their exploits.
Daniel feels he is shoplifting out of necessity, as delays at the Department for Work and Pensions mean he is not getting the benefits he is entitled to.
“I get £240 to last me a month,” he says. “And £150 of that goes to my kids so I’ve got £90 to live on. That £90, I can make that, as you’ve just seen, in two shoplifting grabs. It’s an hour of work.”
The trio shoplift together – three coatfuls are better than one, they say – and they feel there is safety in numbers.
Daniel explains: “You think about it, you’re a security guard, you’re one person by yourself. But then there’s three of them, you’re scared aren’t you really? We don’t mean to create that environment.”
His friend, an older man, insists they are never aggressive. He says: “The fact is we’ve got manners – we say please and ‘don’t touch me’.”
Daniel adds: “All they say is ‘don’t you think you’ve had enough now?’ and ‘come on, come on’. We could be worse for them, we could be jumping on the counters nicking the booze, cigs. But we’re not. Just a bit of food really, which you’ve seen. Helps her out, helps us out because we can go get a bite to eat now. That’s how we’ve got to live. If we don’t do that, we’re wasting away basically.”
He turns his hands up, showing filthy palms that are flecked with blood. “I haven’t had a bath for about a month, I swear, more than that.”
They sleep rough nearby under duvets and sleeping bags, lying next to each other to keep warm.
“I probably wouldn’t do what I’m doing if my benefits got sorted out properly and we got some work to do,” he says.
Daniel recently served a prison sentence for breaching his licence on a drug-related crime, he says, and was given a seven-day course of methadone on his release, intending to get him off heroin and control his addiction. However, instead of the city centre clinic near where he stays, he was referred to one nearly five miles away.
“I can’t get there,” he says. “I had to come off 95 mil of methadone, which is a lot, and go straight to nothing.”
He doesn’t want to shoplift and he spends a lot of time thinking about his young daughter. “I want to be a good role model for her,” he tells the Guardian.
But his attention is now turning away from the alley. At this point, about 4.30pm, he has had only one of the five or six bags of heroin he would normally use in a day. With some money made, the men do not want to chat much longer and disappear into the Christmas shopping crowds to find sustenance.
Two days later and the alley is populated with a new, albeit similar, set of characters. One buyer, a tall 25-year-old man in knock-off designer clothes, says he does not see any moral quandary around purchasing stolen goods. “You go in the shop and you see an offer on something, it’s like that isn’t it?” he says. “If you can get it cheap then why wouldn’t you?”
But others are conflicted. A woman in her 40s, Tina, says she had only recently begun buying items like bacon and butter from shoplifters after a traumatic event left her in a terrifying financial position.
“Before this, I had a really good job,” she says, explaining that until earlier this year she had been working as an office manager but had struggled to hold on to her job after she was raped by a stranger.
“I had to leave my job because I just couldn’t … yeah,” Tina says, welling up.
She spends £100 a week in Asda and Heron Foods and buys only the occasional stolen item. “It doesn’t go far,” she says, especially with five children, one of whom has a disability.
Her parents, who both have professional jobs, would be ashamed if they knew some of the family’s food was stolen, she says. “If they knew I did this, they’d be horrified. I can’t fault them but they still don’t understand what it’s like to not know where your next meal is coming from.”
Tina is too proud to ask for help and would prefer to stand on her own two feet, she says.
She adds: “As much as I don’t agree with it, people do what they need to do.”
