Greggs is a great British success story. The ever-popular bakery chain provides good-quality (if, admittedly, rarely healthy) treats for millions of satisfied Britons. Yet some depressing news has taken the joy out of visiting Greggs for a steak bake and an iced doughnut. The chain has become a Mecca for shoplifters, who refuse to pay even its modest prices.
To deter thieves, Greggs is resorting to desperate measures
To deter thieves, Greggs is resorting to desperate measures: ditching its self-service fridges and keeping sandwiches and bottled drinks behind the counter. The crackdown will be trialled in five stores, the Sun reports. But shoplifting is now so rife it seems likely that these tighter security measures will become the status quo in Greggs – and other similar shops – around Britain.
“Find your yummy”, the Greggs website extols its visitors. Unfortunately, it would appear that the yummy, or at least its protection, has been found wanting. Spend a few minutes in a Greggs store in London and it won’t be long before you see grubby, grasping little opportunists steal their lunch, while other law-abiding people queue up to pay. A Greggs in Whitechapel, east London, where this shoplifting problem is particularly bad, is one of the stores where you now have to ask for a drink rather than help yourself.
That shoplifting has been endemic in higher-value places for years is a regrettable fact of life (if you’re trying to buy a bottle of champagne or spirits in many Tesco or Sainsbury’s stores, you’ll be getting it from behind the cashier). But there’s something deeply depressing about the idea that a £4 sandwich and £2 bottle of drink aren’t considered worthy of paying for, and instead have to be pilfered with apparent impunity.
There will, of course, be some who have limited sympathy for Greggs. People may suggest that, as a profitable business (£2billion in sales in 2024, with a pre-tax profit of £204 million), they are hardly on the breadline, if you’ll excuse the pun, and that a few sandwiches being stolen are hardly here or there.
The sort of snobs who look down on a business that unashamedly offers mass-market comfort food will probably make caustic remarks about the businesses being so basic that they almost deserve to be robbed.
This attitude is fine if you’re the kind of person who has a table reserved virtually every night at The Wolseley or The Devonshire. But for the average diner, who is grateful to be able to eat decently without spending a fortune, Greggs is a lifeline, rather than a punchline, and this is rotten news.
Obviously, there will be new efforts made to stop the shoplifting. Security guards will be prominently deployed in many of the larger stores, which will make the experience of going there rather more unsettling (I haven’t seen Pizza Express having to get in armed guards lately, although I’m sure McDonald’s is employing phalanxes of grim-faced apparatchiks to protect their Big Macs). What’s worse, if the thefts continue, prices will inevitably rise, which will in turn damage the brand’s hard-won reputation for affordability and accessibility.
Yet it says a lot about Britain in 2025 that things have got to this stage. Members of staff are afraid to tackle shoplifters, for fear of being verbally or physically abused, and the chances of the police being bothered enough to come to the store for a tenner’s worth of purloined food and drink are non-existent. (Perhaps Greggs should prominently feature a few copies of The Spectator on their tables, instead.) Having to implement these measures, ridiculous and over-sensitive though they might seem, has now become an inevitability.
A Greggs spokesperson commented of the new security measures that: “This is one of a number of initiatives we are trialling across a handful of shops which are exposed to higher levels of anti-social behaviour…the safety of our colleagues and customers remains our number one priority.”
They are doing their best to present this depressing development, not as a grim reaction to the status quo, but as a positive, forward-looking response. Few will be convinced. Instead, it’s just another reflection on the increasingly doomed high street and the grotesquerie of what awaits you when you pop out for lunch. If you’re not having your wallet rinsed at the check-out, someone else is walking off with their food gratis. Nobody, it would appear, can do very much to check this increasingly miserable state of affairs.
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