Feeling the pinch

It’s constant – all day long. I guarantee that whenever you enter a store, there’ll be a shoplifter in there,” says PC Emily-Jayne Matthews.

We’re sitting waiting for the stores to open in the Grand Arcade, a stately, sky-lit Cambridge shopping centre that houses more than 60 outlets. The biggest draw for shoppers is the John Lewis department store. It is also, thanks to its size and multiple exits, one of the biggest draws for shoplifters.

At 9am the doors open and Matthews – conspicuous in full uniform with high-vis utility vest and police-issue bowler hat – leads me over to John Lewis’s fragrance section, a known shoplifting hotspot, with ladies’ perfumes and men’s sprays worth £200 or more stacked two or three deep. Watching over the scents today is 25-year-old security guard Daif Iqbal. He wears a bodycam and carries two radios – the first to liaise with fellow security staff in the store, the second a Cambridge Business Against Crime (CAMBAC) device that links him to other retailers in the city and to Matthews and her team. Iqbal tends to work on weekends and Mondays and says there is almost always an incident on his watch. Yesterday, there was one involving two people from London. One was 18, the other 14. They were spotted on CCTV pocketing a £321 pair of sunglasses and a £25 wallet, tracked to the St Andrew’s Street exit, then detained by Iqbal as they made to leave.

“They tried to resist but I explained that they were being recorded with my body cam and they then complied,” he tells me. The individuals were photographed and handed a lifetime ban from all John Lewis stores as well as those of sister brand Waitrose. Their details have been recorded and will be shared with police. If they’re found to have committed other offences they’ll be prosecuted – if not, they may receive a police caution or a community order.

We leave Iqbal to what promises to be a busy day, and Matthews and I head out to the street. “EJ”, as she’s known locally, is a prominent figure around here, greeted wherever we go. She’s cheery but commands respect; a 5ft 5in amalgamation of sunshine and steel. As we walk, she explains how she came to become an expert in retail theft. Reviewing a 30-minute sequence of CCTV footage from a shop in the hope of spotting a missing person, she witnessed no fewer than 17 shoplifting incidents. She told her superintendent, who asked her to spend three months looking into the problem. “That was five years ago,” says the 45-year-old, with a chuckle.

Over that period she’s built up a huge bank of knowledge. The biggest surprise, she says, was not so much the breadth of targets – everywhere from upmarket department stores and supermarkets to charity shops – as the diversity of perpetrators. In Matthews’ experience, shoplifters fall into four principal categories: “spree offenders” – who are typically homeless, or addicted to drugs; organised gangs hitting shops in a more coordinated manner to then sell on the stolen goods; what she calls the ‘cost-of-living’ shoplifter; and a new breed of impulse thieves, stealing things they can readily afford, in part for the thrill of it.

But that tells only part of the story: speaking to dozens of shopkeepers, store managers and security officers across the UK, I hear of incidents involving young girls and retirees; manual workers and university graduates; school children and teachers; the mentally disturbed and the fully cognisant. There are moments of madness – and decades of them. In short, a once-niche activity has become a Hydra-like phenomenon in which every time one demographic is cracked down upon, another two seem to spring up.

An Office for National Statistics (ONS) report released on 24th July showed a record 530,643 shoplifting incidents in England and Wales over the previous year, up by a fifth on the year before and the highest since comparable figures were first compiled in 2003. This prompted then home secretary Yvette Cooper to call the situation “an epidemic”. But chronic underreporting means the reality in England, Wales and the rest of the UK is almost certainly far worse than officially acknowledged.

“There are estimated to be around 330,000 retail outlets in the UK,” says Tom Holder, spokesperson for the British Retail Consortium (BRC). “Are we really believing that they receive just a few instances of [this] crime each a year? Because if that’s what the police believe then I’ve got a bridge to sell them.” Holder says that the true figure, according to BRC research, is in excess of 20 million incidents a year – or 55,000 a day. He paints a picture of a situation that’s “spiralling out of control”, with shoplifters emboldened by a lack of repercussions, retail staff failing to report crimes due to a perception of “police inaction” – and a clogged-up justice system in which cases are often not heard for years.

‘Inaction’ is not a charge that would ever stick with PC Matthews. Among the innovative schemes she’s introduced in recent years in Cambridge is Wanted Wednesdays. She puts CCTV images of shoplifters on social media, adds her details and asks them to get in touch. A large number of people have come forward. “The first question they ask is ‘will you now take my picture down?’,” she says. One case was of a mother and daughter who stole clothes and shoes worth more than £600 from John Lewis. Another was a woman who took nearly £1,000 worth of perfume. She got in touch within 12 hours of her picture going up online. “In interview, she told me: ‘Look around you – everyone’s doing it’,” recalls Matthews.

Assuming a shoplifter has no existing criminal record, they may qualify for a “community remedy” that bypasses the overworked court system. The conditions imposed are simple: pay the shop back for the stolen items, face the ignominy of apologising in person and agree to a lifetime ban from the shop. Since initiating her Wanted Wednesdays scheme in September 2024, Matthews has already recouped thousands of pounds for local stores.

Around the corner from the Grand Arcade is the Superdry clothing outlet. We drop in to chat to staff who describe shoplifting as an omnipresent threat. The techniques used by thieves can be elaborate – in Cambridge this has included specially-adapted rucksacks with hidden pockets, foil-lined bags designed to disrupt security alarms and even men dressing in burqas in order to conceal items beneath them. In Superdry, it’s often more brazen. A couple of weeks before my visit, a man picked up £500 worth of rugby shirts, shrugged off a store assistant who challenged him and walked out, assistant manager Zac Rogers, 25, tells me.

“When they [shoplifters] come in it sometimes feels like they don’t really care if we spot them because they know there’s a limit to what we can do,” he says. Often it’s a case of relying on what’s known in retail as “customer-servicing someone out of the door” before a theft can happen: greeting them, offering to assist and staying as close as possible.

In one memorable episode Rogers was on his day off with friends in Cambridge when he got a message on the staff WhatsApp group to say that a man had stolen three £125 puffer jackets. Walking across Jesus Green, an area of parkland in the city, he and his friends were approached by the very same man and asked if they wanted to buy the jackets for £20 each. “He was trying to sell [the company’s] own product back to me,” says Rogers, still incredulous.

As we’re leaving the store, Matthews praises the likes of Iqbal and Rogers: alert, motivated and determined to do their best for their respective employers. But shoplifting takes a toll on staff, leading to frustration, disillusionment – and a recalibration of the shopping experience. As one staff member in the nearby Ark giftshop tells me, “Your whole interaction with customers becomes about judging them rather than welcoming them.”

‘Victimless crime’ is an expression that I absolutely hate. Shoplifting isn’t victimless, there’s always that human element” — PC Emily-Jayne Matthews, Cambridgeshire police

The BRC’s latest annual crime survey of major retailers uncovered an average of 2,000 incidents of violence and abuse against shop workers a day, a rise of 50 percent in a year – and of 340 percent since 2020. Shop workers reported being shouted and spat at, punched and threatened with knives – 70 incidents a day involved a weapon, an amount which has more than doubled in a year. The effects can be profound: plummeting morale, the failure of businesses due to employee absences and profit shortfalls necessitating staff cutbacks. “‘Victimless crime’ is an expression that I absolutely hate,” says Matthews. “It isn’t victimless, there’s always that human element. Yes, Tesco or wherever might be a huge corporation but it’s the people who work there day in, day out just trying to earn their wage who have to deal with it.”

In recent years, lurid tales of middle-class, impulse shoplifters have monopolised media attention. Shoplifting ‘influencers’ on social media have been accused of glamorising theft, with platforms such as TikTok awash with tips on “borrowing”, as it’s colloquially referred to, with defiantly boastful posts detailing “borrowing hauls”. TikTok says that it cancels such accounts as soon as it is made aware of them, but new ones are launched all the time.

New justifications for shoplifting have emerged online, some imbued with anticapitalist, entrepreneurial and even feminist qualities. “Being a teen girl is hard,” one person commented in a study by Northumbria University into the relationship between online groups and shoplifting. “Society teaches girls through the media and the beauty industry that they need to be perfect. I’m sick of handing my money over to corporations that profit on this bullshit…so if I have to put up with this kind of stuff, I’m certainly not going to pay for it.”

For all the focus on the new impulse shoplifters, however, the BRC’s Tom Holder says that organised gangs are responsible for a huge amount of the incidents. He explains how groups hit stores quickly and systematically, moving from town to town. They know where the high-value items are, how to circumvent security and how to shift stolen goods. One expert I speak to describes retail theft as “low risk, high reward” for criminal gangs, who sometimes use vulnerable adults or children as their frontline operatives. They seek to exploit the lack of integration and sharing of information across county lines; while national databases exist, the 43 police forces in England and Wales still operate independently.

The Patmores filled 857 trollies with goods worth £130,000. They stole everything from nappies to alcohol”

This was the case with the six-person Patmore family gang, from Essex, who specialised in self-explanatory “trolley push-outs”. Over a two-year period, and operating in 13 different counties across the south of England, they were found to have filled 857 trollies with goods worth £130,000. They stole everything from nappies to alcohol and cleaning products – before selling them, the court heard, in “their very own criminal supermarket chain”. They were finally stopped after targeting a Tesco store in Guildford, west Surrey. A Surrey police constable was able to join the dots, identify the six thieves and link them to a web of crimes. Sentences of up to three years in prison were handed down to the Patmores at Guildford crown court in April 2025.

Dave Kirk, team leader of Guildford’s group of ‘Town Rangers’

Guildford is often targeted by crime gangs because of its mainline train links with London, Reading and Portsmouth. Like Cambridge, it has a vibrant retail sector. And like Cambridge, it’s deploying innovative means to try to hold back the shoplifting tide.

I speak to Pete Lambert, town safety and venue liaison officer for Experience Guildford, which is a BID – a business improvement district. It looks after the interests of more than 500 retail and hospitality outlets and other businesses in the town and employs a team of ‘Town Rangers’. They work full-time, seven days a week, and, according to team leader Dave Kirk, act as the “eyes and ears of the town”.

I join Kirk on patrol on a busy, blustery Friday afternoon, with Guildford’s elegant, cobbled High Street thronged with shoppers. Kirk wears a dark-blue reflective coat and matching cap, with a bodycam on one side of his chest and Guildford’s version of CAMBAC, the Town Link radio, on the other. He could do without occasionally being confused for a traffic warden, he says, but otherwise he loves his job.

I watch him liaise with store managers, security staff and passers-by. The bearded 36-year-old is friendly but businesslike, vigilant and exudes calm – a useful quality when his role often puts him in the centre of fraught situations. “Having a uniformed presence, with a camera on, is enough to deter theft or violence [most] of the time,” he explains. Kirk acknowledges that shoplifting is rife in the city. “But I like to look at the positives,” he says. “Not what we’re missing – but what we’re catching and deterring.” More recorded incidents of shoplifter interception and the rising value, year on year, of the goods recovered are both badges of success.

Nationally, an increasingly sophisticated ecosystem of anti-theft measures has evolved as businesses seek to get ahead of a problem which costs them £2.2 billion a year, with much of the pain passed on to shoppers. According to the latest figures from the Centre for Retail Research, the inflation of prices by retailers to compensate for losses costs each UK household £133 a year in higher bills. Facial recognition technology is being trialled by companies including Sainsbury’s, with specialist cameras scanning shoppers’ faces as they arrive in store to cross-reference them with a database of previous offenders. Privacy campaigners have criticised such moves as an infringement of human rights and a potential gateway to broader discrimination. Elsewhere, AI is being deployed in the tracking of in-store suspects on CCTV and the identification of items that have bypassed self-checkouts.

But in Guildford it’s a remarkably low-tech tool that has proven most effective: a two-strikes-and-you’re-out exclusion scheme. It’s geared less towards the habitual shoplifter or organised gang member and more towards those acting on the spur of the moment. After first being identified, shoplifters receive a letter informing them that if they get caught again they will be banned from every participating business in the town centre. More than 600 such letters have been handed out in the last two years. “It just stops them dead in their tracks,” says Lambert. “Nine times out of ten, if someone has been given a warning letter they don’t offend again.” He pauses. “Well, in this town anyway.”

It’s a measure of how widespread shoplifting has become in the UK that it’s no longer spoken about solely in criminological terms, but also sociological ones. What it says about the morality of the nation and the robustness of the social contract – that unspoken understanding that a law-abiding majority is integral to a safe and functioning democracy – is a topic on which Professor Emmeline Taylor is uniquely qualified to comment.

Taylor is a professor of criminology at City St George’s University in London and one of the UK’s foremost authorities on retail crime. She’s spent two decades investigating the motivations – and implications – of shoplifting. Her conclusion? Retail theft is one of the clearest barometers of the health, or otherwise, of a nation. “When you’ve got high levels of acquisitive crime it symbolises a fracturing of bonds with the institutions of society,” she says. “Numerous social factors underscore criminality, from declining mental health and homelessness to poverty and the cost of living crisis.”

Slow growth in average earnings combined with high levels of inflation in recent years have hit many in the country hard. Analysis from the TUC in 2024 showed that in real terms, average wages were still below the 2008 level in 212 out of 340 UK local authorities with available data. According to the latest figures from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a charity that works on poverty issues in the UK, 7.1 million households are having to forego essential purchases, with 5.3 million low-income families cutting back on or skipping meals. “[High levels of shoplifting] signify not only that people are not doing very well, but that the services that should be there to help them have also broken down,” says Taylor.

Alongside the increased economic incentives to steal, Taylor describes the criminal justice system as it relates to shop theft as “completely broken”. ‘Stealing with Impunity’ was the title of the 2024 report she was commissioned to write for the Co-op. “The tide’s beginning to turn but for a long time that was precisely the case,” she says. “There was simply no consequence for low-level shop theft.”

One dramatic shift in the calculus of retail theft came in 2014 with the so-called “£200 rule”. Brought in during David Cameron’s coalition government, this was the threshold beneath which a shoplifting offence was classified as “summary” – lower priority and attracting far smaller sanctions. Then-home secretary Theresa May claimed that the aim was to reduce the administrative burden on the police and Crown Prosecution Service. But critics said it was tantamount to decriminalising low-value shoplifting. Labour’s Crime and Policing Bill – now working its way through the Lords – calls for a reversal of the policy, meaning all shoplifting offences would be tried as “general theft”, carrying a maximum custodial sentence of seven years.

Taylor says the 2014 rule was a major factor in the recent precipitous rise of shoplifting, what she describes as “this curious dalliance with criminality… Where I think we’ve got a real problem is we’ve set in motion the idea that shoplifting is no longer the grubby crime it used to be.”

Rob Davies, owner of a vintage shop in Wrexham, north-east Wales, who came to prominence in summer 2025 after putting up signs calling shoplifters “scumbags”

Restigmatising shoplifting, as it were, is a preoccupation of Rob Davies. The 61-year-old was so exasperated by levels of theft at his vintage store in Wrexham, north-east Wales – “some months I wasn’t earning any money at all by the time I’d restocked and paid all my bills” – that he erected a series of signs in his shop over summer 2025, calling shoplifters “scumbags”.

The result was local complaints, national notoriety when the press picked up on the story, and a global response that he found both heartening and deeply depressing: thousands of messages of support from people, all reporting similar problems where they are. Davies is adamant that he’s not going to let this crime wave engulf him, even if it means confronting shoplifters and being knocked “on his backside” from time to time. “Otherwise what do you do? Just allow them to walk out of the shop with your livelihood?”

The increase in shoplifting is just the latest blow for a high street that’s been stuck in the doldrums for years. Data from the Centre for Retail Research shows that an average of 37 British shops a day closed for good in 2024, the vast majority of them small independent retailers, with almost 170,000 shop workers losing their jobs in the same period. Running a bricks and mortar retail business looks like an increasingly unappetising pursuit in the UK.

We’ve set in motion the idea that shoplifting is no longer the grubby crime it used to be” — Prof Emmeline Taylor, City St George’s University

But Davies is not about to throw in the towel, and like PC Matthews believes that part of the answer to the problem of shoplifting lies in the judicious application of social pressure. “Somehow in the last few years shoplifting has become almost socially acceptable,” he says. “We now have to work on turning that around.” An apt analogy, he believes, is drink-driving. When he was growing up in the 1970s it was entirely acceptable for someone to drink several pints and drive home. “Now, nobody really does that. If we can show the public how it affects not just us shopkeepers but them and their purchasing power, how it drives small shops out of business, then we can beat this.”

You have to admire his optimism – although it’s certainly not going to be easy. In a vivid illustration of the ubiquity of the problem, as our photographer is briefly taking a portrait of PC Matthews for this story, the officer suddenly hares off towards the entrance of Boots. A regular offender, who is well known to her, is attempting to leave the shop with an armful of stolen merchandise. I’m reminded of her earlier assessment: every shop, all the time. The drumbeat of larceny pounds on, unabated.

Friday, May 22nd, 2026 - In the mag Long reads Slow Journalism