Re: The first but not the last
The £2.2bn deserves scrutiny before it gets waved around as settled fact. It comes from the British Retail Consortium's annual crime survey. A trade lobby asks its own members to estimate their own losses, nobody audits the answers, and the total gets published as national statistics. The same survey claims 20 million theft incidents in a year. Police recorded around half a million shoplifting offences. So roughly 97 per cent of the claimed incidents exist nowhere in the criminal record, only in retailers' own reporting. "Shrinkage" is an accounting residual: stock the system says should exist and doesn't. Admin error, supplier short-delivery, damage, expiry write-offs and staff theft all drain into the same bucket, and the customer thief is the most flattering label available for the contents. I allege no fudging. I note that the incentive gradient points one way, that no independent verification exists, and that the figure has just done its job as the lobbying instrument behind a new Act of Parliament. A number that useful should be audited. It isn't.
Your £200 point has expired, and was never quite what your local force told you. Section 176 of the 2014 Act made sub-£200 shop theft a summary-only offence. That decided which court heard the case. Immunity never came into it, and no statute ever instructed police to stay home. Non-attendance under £200 was operational triage by forces, dressed in legal clothing whenever constituents asked awkward questions. Parliament repealed it in April anyway, so all shop theft is now triable as general theft carrying seven years. Watch whether attendance improves. If it doesn't, the threshold was never the reason.
On the moral high ground generally. The sector performing outrage about theft books "surplus redistribution" as virtue while food banks report binning large portions of what arrives, mouldy produce and unstorable bread, with disposal costs landing on volunteers and the donation landing in the CSR report. Research launched in the Commons this year found the overwhelming majority of surveyed food aid workers had thrown donated food away. Spare me the sermon on the sanctity of stock from an industry that records waste transfer as philanthropy.
The security tags I read differently. A tag is an involuntary price signal. It announces the item is worth stealing, which is the sincerest available endorsement that it is worth having. Suppliers increasingly bear the tagging cost themselves under source-tagging programmes, applied at the factory and negotiated into the cost price, and the tag vendors openly advertise "open merchandising" as the benefit, trade-speak for keeping desirable stock on shelves where it flatters itself. Deterrent and advert in one lump of plastic. Nobody needs to pay for the marketing effect. It arrives free with the deterrent, and goes conveniently unminded.
On gangs, you have described the supply and skipped the demand. Fences exist for the same reason bakeries do: people want the product. Plenty who would never lift a razor themselves will buy one from a bloke at half price and ask no questions, because the shelf price has drifted somewhere insulting and the two-tier loyalty pricing rubs their nose in it daily. Organised acquisition sits downstream of a market the retailers' own pricing helped create. Naming the gang without naming the customer, or the pricing, is half an analysis.
A cynic might add that nobody in charge seems in a desperate hurry. Theft relocates demand rather than destroying it. The goods get consumed, the shelves get restocked, the insurance churns, and it all registers as activity in an economy producing precious little of the genuine kind. I offer that as suspicion, no more.
And if the complaint is that there aren't enough police, follow the money that would pay for them. Supermarket margins are genuinely thin, granted. The multinationals stocking the shelves are another story, and HMRC's own tax gap estimates run to tens of billions a year, an order of magnitude beyond the theft figure the sector campaigns on. A supply chain that engineered its tax obligations down to a rounding error has limited standing to demand a larger constabulary.
Which brings us to the cameras. The state proposed mandatory digital ID for work last September, collected the better part of three million petition signatures against it, and retreated to "voluntary" by January. The infrastructure did not retreat. It moved into the supermarket doorway, privately operated, lightly supervised, overseen by a regulator whose enforcement cycle runs investigate, find problems, accept assurances, file. Train a population to present its face to buy bread and the voluntary label on everything else becomes decorative. Systems like this arrive by queue rather than decree, and by the time one feels sinister the habituation is years old. The destination has a name, fascism with a loyalty card, though the brochure will say "frictionless". Do I excuse theft? No. I decline to let a self-audited number, a repealed statute and a face scanner do my moral reasoning for me.
