The Shoplifter

2007. On my first day in my job at a supermarket that I’d got after leaving my paper round, there was a shoplifter running out of the shop just as I arrived. I don’t believe in omens, but I really hated my time at that shop and it kind of ended up setting a precedent for what my teenage career in front line retail would be like.

A security guard chased him across the car park and they caught him. I just stood there and watched, mesmerized by the scene. Its like whenever you’ve slowed down when you’ve driven past the scene of a car accident. Any kind of incident will make you brain go “ooh I wanna see what happens next”, but this one left even more of a mark on me because I was confused when I saw the baskets he’d been stealing. They were full of vegetables. Cauliflowers, carrots, a big pack of kale.

Naïve 17-year-old that I was, I would have thought shoplifters would be stealing expensive things (not that the supermarket sold much that was all that expensive aside from alcohol). They did sell DVDs and a few video games, but the shop had this system where they kept the discs in a special cabinet at the customer service desk where you needed to take the receipt and show it to them, as a means of making shoplifting these items basically impossible. I could see the man’s baskets from where I was standing and he hadn’t hidden any bottles or anything else of higher value underneath the vegetables. It was just two baskets of produce.

I kept wondering WHY he’d tried to shoplift that stuff for the rest of the day. Nowadays, its obvious, but at the time it wasn’t. It didn’t really occur to me until years later because I come from a very conservative small town where the idea that not everyone is doing so well is anathema. I remember a lesson where a teacher brought up the old conundrum of “is it okay for someone to steal a loaf of bread to feed their starving family?” and a depressing number of my classmates said “no, because stealing is always wrong.”

The financial crash happened about a year after this incident and the parents of people I knew started to lose their jobs and that incident with the shoplifter started to make a bit more sense to me, and it makes a lot of sense now why shoplifting figures have gone through the roof.

I rarely if ever change my shopping habits. I’ve eaten mostly the same things for about fifteen years. About ten years ago my weekly shop was about £50. Five years ago this was about £70. Now its between £90 and £115 depending on if I have to buy cat litter, sink unblocker or a big pack of toilet rolls.

…and apparently we shouldn’t all be asking for pay rises because that will make an already unsustainable economic situation worse for some spurious reason (which is pretty convenient for the comfortably off).

The cost of living crisis is biting people incredibly hard. I’ve seen spates of articles in big newspapers recently about shoplifting highlighting violent incidents which yes, sure, horrible, I agree, but I rarely see it brought up that one of the most shoplifted items is baby formula milk.

Back when I saw that incident take place right in front of me, I couldn’t see a motive. It made no sense to me. WHY would someone JUST be shoplifting produce? And I see that incredulity reflected in newspaper coverage of shoplifting where questions about the motive of the shoplifters are conspicuous by their absence.

So someone has shoplifted baby formula milk. “WHY?” ask the commentariat. “WHY would someone shoplift baby formula milk?”

When writing antagonists in fiction, a two dimensional antagonist will just do a bad thing just because they want to. They are evil. Mwuhahaha. A three dimensional antagonist will have a fully fleshed out reason that leads them to the conclusion that doing something the audience understands to be morally wrong is the right thing for them to do. The villain has got to believe that what they are doing is in some way justified.

The papers present shoplifters as two dimensional. Shoplifters don’t have lives outside of that moment in which they are shoplifting, but what happens when the shoplifter goes home? WHY are they taking that baby formula home without paying for it?

…oh…oh, they don’t have the money to pay for it BUT they need it.

Of course I’m not saying that “everyone should be free to shoplift” and its not like you can introduce some kind of means test that gives you a card that gives you carte blanche to do it, but this is the reason why I brought up my classmates reactions to the loaf of bread conundrum. The reason they didn’t see there being any kind of moral grey area to it is because they couldn’t conceive of the idea that not everyone is comfortably off. Same with the papers reporting on shoplifting statistics. Same with me when I first saw that shoplifter stealing the baskets of vegetables back when I was a teenager. My first thought was “they’re not high value, so why shoplift them? Ergo they must just be a bad person who enjoys doing bad things.” It didn’t occur to me until that teacher made me think about that conundrum that there might be a REASON that people do something that everyone understands as morally wrong.

Anyway, that’s why nowadays if I saw someone shoplifting produce, I’d probably just think to myself “the shop is a national chain, they’re making enough money, that guy probably isn’t. Let him have it.”