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We're not all criminals

Carol Midgley

October 21 2010 12:01AM

Why do most vendors treat me like a criminal?

I saw someone get caught shoplifting the other day. The culprit was remarkably hard-faced considering that she’d just shoved two eyeliners and a facial peel down her bra. “Well, you should have more tills open, shouldn’t yers?” she snapped, indicating the stupendously long queue in which she’d been standing. Then she leapt over the barriers and out on to the street. Most striking was that the rest of us in that queue merely shrugged and said we didn’t blame her.

Shoplifting costs UK retailers £4.4 billion a year and puts £180 a year extra on the average person’s annual shopping bill, said a report this week. Thieving customers and dishonest staff obviously comprise the main felony base. But here’s a thought, retailers. How about also blaming yourselves? These days I find most vendors treat me like a criminal anyway, so why wouldn’t I behave like one?

Changing-room assistants, trained to assume guilt, address you as if you were a nonce on D-wing. Staffing levels are cut to the bone, thus only one of four tills is ever open so you must queue and queue while a psycho security guard wearing an earpiece glowers as if he’d like to disembowel you.

When the overworked cashier fails to remove the anti-theft tag properly and it triggers all the alarms, Psycho demands that you open your bag in public. “OK, you’re free to go,” he grunts with, ooh, zero apology. Oh, free to GO, am I? Free to fantasise about robbing you blind and handing out free clothes in the street, more like. Somehow the maxim “the customer is king” has become “the customer is the sh**e on the bottom of my shoe”. This weekend, sitting aboard a train about to depart for London, the train manager addressed passengers so aggressively that I actually wrote it down. His four-minute speech over the loudspeaker basically assumed that we were all plotting to trick him by using invalid tickets. “Save yourself time, money and EMBARRASSMENT by leaving this train IMMEDIATELY,” he barked at what transpired to be entirely imaginary miscreants.

There’s no excuse for stealing, obviously, but retailers might find that shrinkage rates improve no end if they actually hire more staff rather than relying on more and more cameras or installing self-service tills then pretending that they’re doing us a favour by making us do their work. The staff that you do have might be slightly less inclined to exact “revenge by stolen handbag” if they weren’t worked like mules. And, anyway, I can’t fathom how people do manage to shove £4.4 billion of stuff down their Y-fronts each year. It’s hard enough buying stuff legitimately. Alcohol and fags are kept behind Perspex screens, petrol stations demand that you “pay first”, tags are so sensitive that they blare if you so much as touch a scarf.

Shoplifters who can thwart all this may be scumbags — but they must also be genius code-crackers. March them directly to MI6 and give them a job.