We were once known as a nation of shopkeepers. We are now a nation of shoplifters. As the Times reported last week, citing two recent reports from criminologists, ‘Britain is an increasingly dishonest society’, where ‘stealing from self-service supermarket check-outs has almost become a national sport.’
It didn’t need academics to tell us what we already know, what we’ve read repeatedly in the newspapers, and what we’ve seen before our very eyes: theft has become commonplace and normalised. But we should still ask ourselves why.
Many factors are at play. The long-term, steady retreat of the police from the streets, an allied decline in civic pride and trust in society, the (correct) belief among would-be criminals that they won’t be prosecuted, and the lockdowns of 2020-21, which lead to a rise in dysfunctional and antisocial behaviour. But one cannot discount another deceptively banal factor: the rise in self-service check-outs themselves.
The lockdowns had appalling psychological consequences
It’s not merely that customers can be absent-minded when using them. Most of us have mistakenly taken something without paying for it. A more pressing problem today, however, is the type of person who is ‘forgetful on purpose’, so to speak. Professor Emmeline Taylor, a criminologist at City, University of London, has coined a term for the type: ‘swiper’, an acronym standing for ‘seemingly well-intentioned patrons in regular’ shoplifting. ‘Shop theft used to be a grubby sort of crime,’ says Professor Taylor. ‘Now you have people joking about the latest thing they have stolen – how they “accidentally” put a bottle of prosecco through, disguised as a bunch of bananas.’
I have never stolen anything ‘accidentally-on-purpose’, but I can understand the type who does. First, on a base level, people feel it unfair that they should perform the job others are paid to do, and if they must perform the labour themselves, they should at least sometimes receive some payment for it in kind.
But there could be a more retributive and vengeful instinct afoot. Many see mechanised tills as symbols of incivility and rudeness, a hostile declaration by supermarkets that they don’t like people: staff or customers. They encapsulate a corporate worldview that dismisses human beings as mere means of production or units of consumption.
People are starting to hate supermarket chains for the same reason they now hate the high street banks who have blithely closed down their branches in recent years. It emerged on Monday that Santander is considering leaving the UK. Supermarkets and banks refuse to deal with us face to face any more, preferring instead obedient robots. It’s also why many people aren’t happy to see ticket offices closed down at railway stations.
This is not to excuse shoplifting, but to understand one reason for it. Like public toilets, self-service tills are liked by some and loved by none. This is why the likes of Asda and Morrisons last year began to make noises about changing their strategy on the matter.
The self-service till represents not only the dehumanised shopping experience – seen on a grander scale with the shift to online shopping – but the dehumanisation of society more fundamentally. Life is itself no-longer experienced in the fleshy, embodied world, but in the virtual one. The lockdown years, when we were cut off from bodily contact with other human beings, were so awful for so many for this very reason. Virtual interaction online embedded further the fallacy that humans consist of mind and detachable body, rather than bodies with a mind (to paraphrase the existential philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty).
The lockdowns had such appalling psychological consequences for this reason. This is why those who experienced them in their formative years don’t know how to deal with people in the real world, why society has become dysfunctional and lawless. That many were already enslaved to the virtual world has only compounded problems.
Social media trends have encouraged criminality, with TikTok clips sharing tips on how to steal from retailers. As David Shepherd, a criminologist at the University of Portsmouth, told the Times: ‘We have young people being exposed to attitudes which normalise everyday dishonesty and everyday cheating.’
We already know that dehumanisation is intrinsic to mindset of the thief. ‘A victimless crime’ – so goes the eternal cant of the shoplifter, seeking to convince others and convince himself that he has harmed no-one. The very concept of ‘restorative justice’, in which the perpetrator of a crime meets his victim, is founded on the idea that a criminal must learn and understand that his victim was a human being like him.
Thanks to social media, online shopping and self-service tills, we no longer recognise others as humans like ourselves. The rush by supermarkets to embrace automation makes only more acute a feeling of alienation, indifference and hostility. It’s no wonder that some libertines respond in kind with their own acts of inhumanity and incivility.
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