I spend a good deal of time in my local Waitrose because I find it relaxing, even when I don’t buy very much.
It’s a sort of temple to soft British capitalism – that benign, eccentric mixture of relatively high-quality foods whose chemicals and packaging are held in check by myriad regulations, while its prices, while high, feel like nothing next to a Whole Foods or similar American upscale chain.
I love browsing the cutting edge of luxury convenience. Did I know I wanted a new mixture of crab and scallop in a large shell ready to eat; a watercress-infused tzatziki, a large glass tumbler with a bee motif? No: but, now I know it exists, it turns out that maybe I do!
“What will they think of next,” I often mumble internally, strolling happily among the pomegranate syrups and rose-harissa pastes.
But this is increasingly a shop whose charms seem to belong to an era in which Britons didn’t have to do their shopping under the watchful gaze of ubiquitous cameras and security guards.
A period in which we did not expect thugs to regularly swagger in to stores and steal the priciest things they can get their hands on, like spirits and wine. A period when the the general decency governing most daily life seemed to so rarely be disrupted that most customers could remain oblivious to infractions for years at a time.
An era, in other words, which is now apparently long gone. Last week, Lucy Brown, director of central operations and security at the John Lewis partnership, said bluntly that soaring shoplifting rates are not, as bleeding heart types insist, to do with the cost of living. “I’m not seeing that,” she said. “I describe it as absolutely greed, not need.”
“There are lots of people, they shoplift for as many hours in the week as I work, which is a lot. It’s basically their occupation.
You get organised gangs . . . They will strip the shelves . . . They’re doing that for resale.” Other thieves are doing it to fund various addictions.
Brown is unusual for her straight-talking assessment. Pointing out the obvious moral decay of society, and the proliferation of bad actors, rather than pinning the blame on a harsh and cruel social system, evil Tories in Westminster, or inequality is deeply unpopular. This isn’t surprising; assigning people moral agency and responsibility for their actions contravenes the basic worldview of the wokerati. But “greed, not need” seems, to me, to be exactly the right line.
More than once I have been in Waitrose, absorbed in the latest nut medley tin, and have heard an almighty scuffle, shouting security guards and alarms.
Staff working in the alcohol section (next to the nut aisle) tell me that the gangs of today don’t even pretend to need basics. They swagger right over to the priciest booze, take and run in coordinated grabs. They show no fear, no shame, no interest in consequences (confident there will be none).
Staff aren’t trained in combat or self-defence so don’t feel inclined to intervene too extensively, which is understandable. It isn’t safe for them to do so.
It is amazing that being a Waitrose floor worker has now apparently become one of the more perilous, crime-facing jobs on the high street.
How did this happen? It seems clear to me: a combination of general cultural sag and progressive good intentions backfiring – visible in excessive lenience from the justice system and the police – has produced a new generation of dead-eyed young people, people one can only describe as morally feral.
However snooty it sounds, the fact is that when gang thuggery comes to Waitrose and M&S, something has gone badly wrong. This is not because Waitrose shoppers deserve the peace of well-administrated law and order more than Tesco and Asda shoppers, but because it shows the sheer expansion of rank and violent criminality.
To see where things are going, we might look at the Co-op, which has outposts in communities across Britain. As its own webpages point out, it has spent “more than £200 million in recent years” on security.
Various effortfully upbeat texts detail the installation of “intelligent” CCTV, Smart Water “fog systems” to befuddle thieves looking for the exit, fortified kiosks, a system called MySafety that allows staff to report crime from their own devices and body-worn cameras.
Despite this, in April the Co-op said that incidents of shoplifting, abuse, violence and anti-social behaviour had risen by 44 per cent in 2023 compared to 2022, running at roughly 1,000 a day.
Unless Labour is capable of a transformation in British law and order, which seems extremely unlikely, we will be going the way of shops on the west coast of America, with everything from bottled water to toothpaste locked to cabinets, requiring staff to get them out.
It is a sad and bizarre thought; orange juice and loo roll chained to the shelves of Waitrose.
It’s sad too that more and more electronic eyes will be needed to watch shoppers – not because I find it intrusive, but because it’s a reminder of just how utterly the social contract appears to have been smashed.
This deadening of morality is a wider problem of youth culture. City dwellers have become used to a sense of ambient nastiness, with knife crime seemingly out of control. But it’s the utter lack of remorse the murderers show in the dock that sends chills up the spine, and speaks to the difficulties we will soon face.
Getting tough on crime is one thing: convincing Britain’s new feral youth to grow up is another, and far trickier.