I spend a lot of time in my local Waitrose as I find it relaxing even though I don’t do much shopping.
It’s a kind of temple of soft British capitalism—that bland, eccentric mix of relatively high-quality food whose chemicals and packaging are held in check by myriad regulations, while their prices, while steep, feel like nothing next to Whole Foods or similar. American luxury chain.
I love browsing the high end luxury amenities. I knew I wanted a new ready-to-eat large shell crab and scallop mix; tzatziki with watercress, a large bee-themed glass? No: but now I know it exists, and it turns out it might!
“What will they come up with next,” I often mutter to myself as I walk happily among the pomegranate syrups and pink harissa pastes.
But this is increasingly a store whose charms seem to belong to a time when Brits didn’t have to shop under the watchful eye of ubiquitous cameras and security guards.
A period in which we did not expect thugs to regularly show off in shops and steal the most expensive things they could get their hands on, such as spirits and wine. A time when the general decency governing much of everyday life seemed to be so rarely violated that most customers could remain oblivious to transgressions for years.
In other words, an era that is now clearly long gone. Last week, Lucy Brown, director of central operations and security at John Lewis Partnership, said bluntly that the sharp rise in shoplifting was not linked to the cost of living, as the bleeding-heart types claimed. “I don’t see that,” she said. “I describe it as sheer greed, not need.
“There are a lot of people out there, they shoplift as many hours a week as I work, which is a lot. It’s basically their calling.
You get organized gangs. . . They rip out the shelves. . . They do it for resale.” Other thieves do it to fund different addictions.
Brown is unusual for her straightforward assessment. Pointing to the obvious moral decay of society and the proliferation of bad actors, rather than placing the blame on a harsh and cruel social system, the evil Tories at Westminster or inequality, is deeply unpopular. This is not surprising; attributing to people moral agency and responsibility for their actions is contrary to the basic wokerati worldview. But “greed, needlessness” seems like exactly the right phrase to me.
More than once I’ve been in Waitrose, sunk into the last tin of nut mix, and heard an almighty scuffle, screaming security guards and alarm systems.
The staff in the liquor department (next to the nut aisle) tell me that today’s gangs don’t even pretend to need the basics. They head straight for the most expensive booze, grab and run in coordinated grabs. They show no fear, no shame, no concern for the consequences (they are convinced there will be none).
The staff aren’t trained in combat or self-defense, so you don’t feel inclined to intervene too extensively, which is understandable. It is not safe for them.
Amazingly, being a Waitrose floor worker has now apparently become one of the most dangerous jobs facing high street crime.
How did it happen? It seems clear to me: a combination of general cultural decline and progressive good intentions gone awry—visible in the over-leniency of the justice system and the police—has created a new generation of dead young people, people who can only be described as morally savage. .
As arrogant as that sounds, the fact is that when gangland thugs visit Waitrose and M&S, something goes very wrong. This is not because Waitrose customers deserve the peace of well-administered law and order any more than Tesco and Asda shoppers, but because it shows a sheer rise in rank and violent crime.
To see where things are going, we can look at the Co-op, which has bases in communities across Britain. As its own website points out, it has spent “more than £200m in recent years” on security.
Various briskly optimistic texts detail the installation of “intelligent” CCTV, Smart Water “fogging systems” to confuse thieves looking for an exit, fortified kiosks, a system called MySafety that allows staff to report crime from their own devices and body cameras.
Despite this, the Co-op said in April that incidents of shoplifting, abuse, violence and anti-social behavior were up 44 per cent in 2023 compared to 2022, by around 1,000 a day.
If Labor fails to transform UK law and order, which seems highly unlikely, we will go the way of America’s West Coast shops, where everything from bottled water to toothpaste will be locked in cupboards, requiring staff to get them out. .
It’s a sad and bizarre thought; orange juice and a toilet chained to Waitrose shelves.
It’s also sad that more and more electronic eyes will be needed to monitor shoppers – not because I find it intrusive, but because it’s a reminder of how the social contract seems to have been completely destroyed.
This deadening of morality is a wider problem of youth culture. City dwellers have grown accustomed to the sense of ugliness surrounding them, and knife crime seems to be spiraling out of control. But it’s the utter lack of remorse shown by the killers in the dock that sends chills down our spines and speaks to the trouble we’re about to face.
Arguing against crime is one thing: persuading Britain’s new wild youth to grow up is another and far more difficult.