It's hard to feel sorry for supermarkets

Skimming the news from my home country, the UK, I noticed "Middle class shoplifting" in one headline and had to take a look.

Shoplifting – stealing from shops – has been in the news over the last two-three years and is hailed an epidemic by the UK Justice secretary. Coverage has included stories of gangs of people who steal to order, often from supermarkets, walking in en masse with empty luggage or even wheelie bins to fill up on goods. They ignore or threaten the shop workers and security guards who form frontline of efforts to stop them.

But it has included 'middle-class' shoplifting too. Apparently when the middle-classes steal it's a quieter, sneakier more personal affair. It's slipping expensive things into the bottom of prams and pretending to forget they are there. Or it's using the self-check-out and failing to scan some of the higher ticket items but packing them into your shopping bags anyway. It's seeing a long queue to pay on your lunchbreak and deciding that you simply don't have time – if the store wants your money, they should make it easier for you to hand it over.

When the two types of theft are given different treatment by the press, the gangs are simply criminals, but for middle class thieves there is a suggestion of a mental health situation. It's an addiction, or a compulsion. Not only can they be cured of it, but they are practically 'suffering' from it.

What the two types of thief have in common, is the idea that it’s the customers, and not the supermarkets, who need to change their behaviour. It's a thread that runs through the coverage. Singling out the entitled middle-classes is an easy way to avoid talking about theft as a direct result of the cost-of-living crisis. It makes sense that Archie Norman, chairman of the retailer Marks and Spencer, likes the middle-class story the best. He is not only a prolific businessman but a former conservative MP. Solving wealth inequality is not the way to stop shoplifting, then. Shaming people into being better, more honest consumers, is the answer.

Archie Norman also believes that the introduction of self-service checkouts is to blame, as they make it too easy for people sneak goods through without paying.

There could be truth in that. Because, even for the people who can afford it, in a culture of entitlement you could imagine the feeling not so much of getting away with it, but of being owed – owed for having to do the work of scanning yourself, owed for the irritation of being in the supermarket at all, owed because the underpaid staff are not knowledgeable or helpful, owed because the self-check outs aren't very good, owed for all the money you are spending without a hint of customer service.

It's interesting to me, when the lack of checkout staff is cited as a reason, that the question of taking on more staff and making the staff more knowledgeable (and paying them more for the effort), is not asked. Instead we are left to quietly enjoy the irony that slashing staff numbers has eventually cost money.

It's interesting too because, I'm sure we used to live within a moral code whereby stealing was wrong whether you got caught or not. It didn't matter who it was from, it was shameful. But it looks there are some situations in modern life that fall outside the code, even for people who are not usually of a criminal mindset.

Why?

I am thinking about two reasons. The first is abundance. The second is disconnection.

Starting with abundance, supermarkets are cornucopias, full of food. And they are everywhere. In the UK in 2022, four retailers had over a 65% of the market share for grocery shopping. The largest was Tesco (26.9%), a chain with 2,932 stores. So, in our small country, you don't have to go very far to find one, and the shelves are always full. No one could be kidded into thinking that as a nation, we don't have enough food, and the food waste stats back it up.

So, stealing it isn't going to hurt any of your fellow citizens. You are not taking the food from another person. There is plenty left behind for everyone. When we know that there is enough, going without becomes nonsensical. Prices seem insulting. And while we continue a myth that some people can't afford food because of something they have done, and that that's fair, deep down we know that makes no sense. So middle-class shoplifters, even though they don't need to steal to eat, won't be getting the sense that some other person is suffering because food has been ripped from their hands.

If you add disconnection to this, then the effect is multiplied. The supermarket staff, who wear the same uniform nationwide, whose work is not respected by the rest of us as interesting or important (despite that if all supermarket workers decided not to show up to work, in a matter of days none of us would have anything to eat) have no obvious stake in what happens on the shop floor. They get paid no matter what happens. The loss happens further up the chain. We don't know exactly where.

And we are not only disconnected from the people who provide us this food, we are disconnected from the food. It's the same from store to store, most of the year around. The packaging doesn't vary. There is no evidence that it has ever been touched by human hands. Most of us have a rough idea at best how many steps it has gone through to end up on the shelves.

Uninterrupted supply is a truth that has been adopted into the psyche of the supermarket shopper. We trust there is always more, and prices seem arbitrary. When prices rise, it feels like someone is cheating, because the person we are buying from is Tesco, and Tesco is so big they should be able to take the hit. Right?

When I am thinking about our lives during these end stages of capitalism, I return often to the image of a loop or a circuit. We exist on a capitalist loop with the supermarket. At one end of the loop are the long hours of paid work we undertake to manage sufficiency in our lives. When the unrecognised labour of care, family, and household tasks (including grocery shopping) are taken into account, most people of working age are time poor. Follow the loop around, and you find that under these conditions, people seek ease and convenience. Nothing is easier or more convenient than the supermarket. And when we choose the supermarket, in a small but not insignificant way we perpetuate the capitalist system, by spending with the giants. When we feed the giants, and they accumulate money and power, the loop that requires us to work long hours and remain time-poor stays closed.

Alternatives to the supermarket are a nice idea. The image of a local farm store, which is not faceless, where the buyer has a closer relationship to the food, the person selling it, and the person growing it, is beautiful. But it takes more time to shop, more knowledge to use seasonal food, more time to prepare, more money because smaller businesses can't compete with the supermarket on price – so more unpaid household labour as well as higher cost. It makes avoiding the supermarket, even if we want to, a luxury that perhaps even the middle-classes can't afford.

On some level, perhaps we all understand that we are at the mercy of the supermarket. The supermarket has power over us, and perhaps there is something about that which makes it fair game. Injustice is rife everywhere, but the supermarket seems unstoppable, like it can never fail. And when prices rise, and shareholders continue to win, as we traipse the aisles in a haze, pushing to get through the week, perhaps there is a sense that when it's us against the supermarket, there is no point in being the only one who plays by the rules.

(Photo credit: Franki Chamaki on Unsplash)