Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Virtuous hypocrites are everywhere

I was amused to read recently that supermarkets were mystified as to the sudden passion for the humble carrot sweeping the nation; more specifically, swiping the screens of supermarket self-checkouts, to the extent that Britons allegedly bought 800 million more of the orange denture-denters last year than they did in 2013. Perhaps shoppers had finally heard the Medieval rumours about them being a cure for sexually transmitted diseases, and with syphilis up 20 percent year on year considered it a convenient and crunchy way to swerve embarrassment at the doctors.

But no, the merch in question wasn’t humble carrots at all, but a flighty fruit much loved by the airheads of Instagram – they were expensive avocados, which wily thieves have been scanning as the cheapest loose vegetable by weight. Senior Criminology lecturer Emmeline Taylor told the Times: ‘I was working with retailers to reduce shoplifting when one major supermarket discovered it had sold more carrots than it had ever had in stock. Unfortunately this wasn’t a sudden switch to healthy eating – it was an early sign of a new type of shoplifter.’

Thieving from amiable robots is nothing new – more than £3billion of goodies are subjected to a five-fingered discount each year as the dear mechanoid blathers blithely on about its bagging area, bless it. Almost a quarter of shoppers have admitted to stealing something in this way, but I’m not one of them – as a former teenage county champion shoplifter, I’d feel humiliated by the lack of skill and challenge involved in stealing from an eyeless android. I wasn’t surprised when Ms Taylor added that the scavengers may not even see it as stealing; ‘This behaviour is perceived as cheating the system or a way of ‘gamifying’ an otherwise mundane routine.’ In short, it’s the chosen vice of virtue-signalling sneaks lacking the nerve to straight-up steal from under the nose of a sentient being.

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