‘One for me, one for you’: Inside the mindset of a brazen shoplifter – and how they are getting away with it

As new figures show shoplifting offences have risen to the highest level since records began , Zoe Beaty looks at how stealing from supermarkets has become such a big problem and is a crime that is being committed by the middle classes too...

A would-be shoplifter conceals an item under his jacket (Getty Images)

The thing is, do they really need my money?” asks Sophie*, who is not using her real name for obvious reasons. She’s a 39-year-old professional working in London, from a reasonably wealthy family – who taught her all she knows about shoplifting.

“My mum is a brazen thief,” laughs Sophie. “I know loads of people who do it. A friend told me the other day that she carries an old receipt in her pocket while she’s shopping, just any old receipt. Then, just before she’s about to walk out of the supermarket – in a confident stroll, of course – she pops the receipt in her mouth, juggling food in her arms, to make it look like she’s just bought everything.

“They never suspect a thing.”

If you’ve read any reports about the retail industry this year, you’ll be well aware that Britain’s problem with pilfering has grown to epic proportions. Data released this week shows that a total of 430, 104 offences were logged by the police last year which is an equivalent to 1,178 cases a day. This is up more than a third and is the highest figure since current records began.

Many people now see this crime as a sort of ‘organised looting’. Last year, Marks & Spencer chair Archie Norman made headlines after describing the rise in theft as a “social phenomenon” partly fuelled by self-service checkouts and middle-class shoppers. “With the reduction of service you get in a lot of shops, a lot of people go in and think, ‘Well this didn’t scan,’ or ‘It’s very difficult to scan these things through and I shop here all the time’; ‘It’s not my fault, I’m owed it.’”

“At the moment, to be honest, they’re all busy seasons for us,” says Lauren Paver, commercial director at Triton Security, which works with some of the biggest businesses in the UK. “But from Black Friday, it just takes off for us in the retail world, all the way through the Christmas period.”

After more than a decade of cuts, more than 14 million people were living in poverty in the UK in 2021/22, according to government statistics – even before the cost of living crisis really took its toll. It’s no surprise, then, that much of the theft the company deals with involves essentials like milk, bread, and baby formula. But over the last year, it’s seen an uptick in more unusual crimes.

“We’ve got a situation where we’ve got lobsters that are in quite big boxes in stores, and what we suspect people are doing is taking the actual lobster out of the box, because they find it easier to secrete the lobster in a pushchair, maybe underneath it and covering it with a coat or blanket,” says Steve Kinnon, Triton’s contract manager. “That’s one thing that’s quite popular at the moment.”

Along with lobsters, Kinnon adds, extra security for “good butter”, such as alarmed packaging, has been essential.

“People have been running out with coffee machines, too. Eggs are another problem. A suspect might be buying a carton of medium eggs, but they’ve swapped them for large ones, or better ones, inside. So when they go to the till, they’re scanning the cheaper egg box. We’re seeing more and more comprehensive methods of stealing.”

“It’s this mindset where it doesn’t feel like you’re stealing if you’re paying for something,” Paver continues. “On the self-service checkouts, they’ll put a more expensive product through as, I don’t know, a white potato. They’re thinking, ‘Well, I spent enough money in here, and I’m only taking back £2.’ They’re justifying their attitude.”

Sophie says her mum – a white, middle-class, well-spoken woman – would often hold products in her hand while paying, and when asked to pay for them would simply say “I think we’ve spent enough money in here” and walk off. “She taught me to swap the price stickers and how to cite my consumer rights,” Sophie laughs. When it comes to self-service checkouts, there’s a prevailing attitude that the customer is already “working” for the store, so you’re allowed to take “payment”.

“In Waitrose, for example, Mum would scan half of the products through the till saying: ‘One for me, one for you, one for me, one for you.’”

Have they ever been caught? “When I was younger, I used to just walk around with something in my hand and then walk out, but once I got caught,” Sophie says. “I told them I wasn’t stealing but I was dyspraxic, so I didn’t know what I was holding. They called my mum and asked her to confirm what condition I had, and she panicked and said I had asthma.

“It was pretty funny – she didn’t tell me off. My mum grew up working-class. I think a lot of middle-class people in London, reading lefty newspapers, see themselves as working class when they’re not, and think ‘Sod you’ to the corporations. I don’t think Tories shoplift as much as lefties; that would be my theory.

“I think if [Mum] got caught she’d be offended. She always gets away with it, anyway.”

While some shops are losing the fight against shoplifters, police are making progress in Nottinghamshire, Sussex and Essex. Recognising that this is far from a “victimless crime”, which many assume it is, they are joining forces with store owners to identify repeat shoplifters and shoplifting hotspots.

Kinnon also says that security systems in supermarkets are more sophisticated now than they’ve ever been. Many use specialised facial recognition software such as Facewatch, a “crimefighting tool” that identifies shoplifters by CCTV and puts their image on a database that can be viewed by police. “After that event, if you were to go into that store or any other store using Facewatch, every staff member’s phone would ping with an image of the person’s face on their phone. Chances are, after that, staff members will come up to you and ask if you need any help.”

They also use security officers dressed in plain clothes. “Often, people don’t realise just how much security there is,” says Paver. “We do understand hunger, and the difficult situations people are finding themselves in; middle-class people are also the ones stealing bread and milk now. But we just cannot sit back and let this happen – we’re in an epidemic of shoplifting.

“And we’ve had to step up: we do use profiling in our game, so we’ve had to adapt. What someone suspicious looks like has changed from two or three years ago.

“Now it might be a ‘professional’ thief, or someone hungry – or just someone who walked into a store and fancied a lobster on Christmas Day.”