shoplifting costs £4.4bn

The_White_Horse

mostlycheerful wrote: »

Yeah, a lot of people, both the public and the staff, are permanently on the rob. To a lot of people it’s just normal compulsive behaviour and fair game, have it away with anything that’s not nailed down whenever they can. All property is theft so it’s just redistribution of wealth. It’s the daily revolution. And why not. They’ve got it, you want it, so just take it off’em. The Home Office recently admitted that it knows of “1.6 million hardened full time criminals” at large running amok doing heavy evil crime all the time everywhere in UK and that there’s no intention to ever arrest, imprison or deport any of them other than the occasional token few. So there you are, it’s a dog eat dog free for all in crime-pays-UK deliberately knowingly allowed to proliferate by the negligent incompetent unfit for purpose asleep at the wheel failed government, police and justice system. But don’t worry, the mug taxpayer always picks up the bill as they mostly can’t avoid or evade the tax extortion. So it’s business as usual and trebles all round, mine’s a large one, ta. And businesses just have to build in the “wastage” and loss to their profit margins so the honest punters pay extra to fund the criminals and thieves, not only via their stolen taxes but also by always paying extra for all goods and services. Twas ever thus, and probably always will be. So get rich or die trying. There’s no justice. The only justice is what you get for yourself.

Blah blahdy blah, etc for another 100 pages.

do you have to start every paragraph you write with "Yeah"?

bo_drinker

Shoplifting: the new middle-class disease?
We all have our own image of a shoplifter - and it’s wrong. Top PR executive and petty thief Belinda Mowbray explains why she does it
Zorislav Srebic, the head of the Croatian Football Federation arrested the other day for shoplifting in a W H Smith at Gatwick airport, was released without charge. It was a misunderstanding, said the CFF, and the police agreed. I could have told them he was innocent. His approach is too amateur to join the ranks of sensible, respectable people like me, who, though perfectly well-off, still feel compelled to take things we could easily afford and don’t particularly want from high-street shops without paying for them.

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who occasionally doesn’t pay for things she should, rather than a petty criminal: more Holly Golightly than the kind of career shoplifter whom documentaries show preying on shopping centres in deprived areas. Yet the truth is that I have been shoplifting sporadically for most of my adult life and I doubt that I will get through Christmas without pilfering something along the way.

The last time I shoplifted is typical. I was in a Topshop in Central London buying jeans. After I’d paid (I steal only from shops where I’ve also made a legitimate purchase), I spotted a little grey vest top I quite liked the look of. At £28 I could comfortably afford it, but thought it was very overpriced. I was also frustrated at the thought of joining the long queues to try it on in the changing rooms and then waiting in line again to pay for it. It wasn’t tagged and so I put it over my arm and continued to browse the crowded store, seemingly deep in thought and occasionally picking up other items. Eventually I’d worked it so that I’d left the other clothes I’d picked up back on the rails and the vest was in one of my shopping bags, along with a jumper I’d been wearing when I left home.

By the time I picked my moment to walk out I had mentally cast myself as a nice girl in a bit of a daze. I made sure I was talking distractedly on my mobile phone as I departed, and was so confident that I could convince anyone who challenged me that the vest was in my bags by mistake that my heart rate barely increased as I strolled through the doors and out on to the street. Six months before this, I did the same with a scarf from Zara. And before that, I walked out of Miss Selfridge wearing a pretty gold necklace.

RELATED LINKS
It’s not the new pair of shoes, it’s the ‘high’
Am I really a shoplifter?
According to a report published this week, Britain is the shoplifting capital of Europe. I am, apparently, contributing to £26 million worth of goods that go missing every day.

Why do I do this? Partly because I can: at 34, I am climbing the ranks of a large public relations firm, the kind of company where a shoplifting conviction would pretty much end my career, but I don’t think anyone who pinches the sort of minor items I take, as carefully and infrequently as I do, is going to get caught, and certainly not prosecuted. I don’t consider myself as having a habit – more a recurrence, on the occasions where the opportunity to steal something very minor presented itself and I took it.

But I shoplift partly because I want to. When I am considering whether to take something I can convince myself that while what I’m doing is not morally defensible, it can be justified as tit-for-tat against the large retailers who rip me off. I don’t go into shops intending to steal, but I do get taken over by fits of righteous indignation. Once, shopping in Gap, my thinking went: “Gap have asked me to pay too much for this T-shirt they had made for sixpence in China or India. So I’ll give them their money for the shirt but also take a necklace without paying and then we’ll be even.” By contrast, I would never dream of pickpocketing: first, I don’t think I’d get away with it, and second, it is not a victimless crime. Equally, I would never steal a book. Yet when I’ve got whatever it is that I’ve taken home, I do feel bad about it.

That nagging feeling of being at best sneaky and mean-spirited, and at worst plain dishonest, descends – just as it does if I make a train journey without buying a ticket or leave a restaurant suspecting I have been undercharged. Whatever I’ve lifted, which is normally clothes and jewellery, also gets tainted with this sentiment to the extent that I would never give something I haven’t paid for to anyone else as a present.

Lucy, a married recruitment consultant, who shoplifts regularly at her local supermarket, doesn’t feel this moral dimension as keenly. “I’ll have my daughter in the trolley along with a whole load of stuff and every so often I’ll just ‘forget’ to take a pack of beers or whatever out of the trolley to run through the till and then stack the stuff I have paid for on top of it. It is an old trick left over from my university days that the guys I shared a house with used to get me to do because if I was ever caught out I could play the dappy, distracted blonde, smile and pass it off as an accident. It’s nice to save the odd five quid but it’s not really about the money. My view is that if the retailer is too dumb to monitor the checkouts properly they deserve it.” Another friend tells me about Jim, a good, kind man, she says, who works for a successful internet company. He is well off, and has no need to shoplift, either. But he has mastered the same art as Lucy, frequently stealing bottle upon bottle of Evian from Sainsbury’s. “Water should be free,” he says, shortly.

But neither they nor I would steal from the local corner shop or admit our dirty habits to too many friends. “The supermarket is a face-less corporate giant,” Lucy says. “But I am friendly with the bloke at my local mini-mart so I wouldn’t want to diddle him and I’d be mortified if he caught me trying to. In fact, I’d be embarrassed if even my husband knew about this. To me, shoplifting is akin to picking your nose. It’s a nasty habit that one occasionally finds oneself doing for no good reason and is best kept private in case other people don’t sympathise with your weakness for it.”

So why do nice, middle-class people like me have a weakness for shoplifting? What makes us want to diddle anyone? I think it is precisely because we know it is wrong. In lives like ours that are dominated by complying with rules – paying our taxes on time, licensing our televisions, MoTing our cars – it is exciting to bend them once in a while. And before all you law-abiding, middle-class citizens jump up on your soapbox, let me ask you this: have you ever taken anything home from the office that isn’t yours? A stapler, perhaps? Or sticky tape? Might you have thought, “They don’t pay me enough, so I’m not going to feel guilty”? Did you also see it as a way of exacting revenge? Is that so different? When I was about six, my mother caught me taking a lipstick out of a chemist and dragged me back into the shop to return it and apologise. This incident should be burnt on my brain as a moment of shame, but in fact I remember it as one of exhilaration: of what it felt like to be really, properly, bad. From time to time in my generally law-abiding life since then I have wondered whether, with a bit more nerve and badness, I could have made a successful criminal. I know that the answer to that is a negative, but very occasionally and very surreptitiously, I need to make sure.

The author’s name has been changed



The £16 billion epidemic

Shoplifting in Britain has been getting steadily worse over the past ten years, with losses now at £16.25 billion a year. Some is staff theft, but most of it is by customers. Retailers spend £700 million a year on new surveillance equipment and detection, but even this has not been able to keep up as longer opening hours deliver greater opportunities for theft.

Most stores prosecute shoplifters, but Kevin Hawkins, director-general of the British Retail Consortium, says the penalties are minor. “The fixed penalty notices are not working, with about half never paid, and it is rare for shoplifting to go to court or attract police attention,” he says. The BRC wants stiffer deterrents – higher fines and even prison – and swifter police action. Stores are trying to increase detection, often challenging people on their way out. This in turn has led to an increase in the number of assaults suffered by guards and, in the case of smaller shops, the owners and staff themselves.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article2923540.ece

lostinrates

bo_drinker wrote: »

Shoplifting: the new middle-class disease?

Its not new: I remember girls at school doing it, and they didn't need to either. To be honest it turns my stomach when people who can afford to shoplift. I don't like the term ''shoplift'' either, somehow lighter than another form of stealing. Thieves is what these people are.

wherediditallgothen

Those dastardly public sector workers will stop at nothing will they? There will be a lot more of them shoplifting tomorrow.

Loughton_Monkey

Let's not forget who carried out the survey. It was a company selling security systems for shops.

They are hardly likely to say "Ooh look. Shoplifting is on the decrease. Well done shops. Carry on doing what you're doing."

Also, don't forget those shops who do a lot of 'cash' [sniff... know what I mean.... look both ways... don't want a receipt do you?.....]. Now what are they going to say when HMRC come sniffing round asking them why their books show that they bought 500 widgets, only sold 450, and they're out of stock...

Of course they were nicked weren't they?

Running_Horse

When I worked in retail it was always the staff who took the most. The shoplifters themselves fitted every racial and chav stereotype you would expect, with none of the absent minded old ladies we are lead to believe are responsible.

bendix

poppingjay wrote: »

Sentimental.... yes maybe i am thank god for that, because I'm not ready to become a machine head just yet, so I'm sorry if the passion in my comments detracted from my point but I thought my post was clear? If businesses can get away with putting their prices up they will, often in collusion with each other.

I also haven't noticed the supermarkets or the high streets doing much to support British industry, manufacturing or agriculture.

The amount they save by importing cheap good in should more than offset any amount that is shop lifted.

Maybe on the packaging/clothes labels, they should put travelling distance, cost to produce, mark up and the wages of the poor sod that produced it.

More sentimental nonsense with no substance.

Supermarkets import cheap goods from overseas because - wait for it - consumers (you and me) demand it. If we wanted more expensive produced items from Britain, we would demand them, shops would sell them etc etc.

And guess what. Supermarket chains pay their people peanuts because . . yeah, you guessed it again . . because we demand cheap goods. WE are to blame for people earning peanuts, because we want to save money.

Do you see a pattern emerging here?

It is the greed and avarice of the average British consumer that has caused the demise of British manufacturing, not just of food but of all such goods. We want them quickly and cheaply, so we get them in from those lands full of brown people. We like it that way. We collude with big business in that way.

So when you're attacking the big business that you don't trust, is it not just the rage of Caliban at seeing his reflection in a mirror?

poppingjay

bendix wrote: »

More sentimental nonsense with no substance.

Supermarkets import cheap goods from overseas because - wait for it - consumers (you and me) demand it. If we wanted more expensive produced items from Britain, we would demand them, shops would sell them etc etc.

And guess what. Supermarket chains pay their people peanuts because . . yeah, you guessed it again . . because we demand cheap goods. WE are to blame for people earning peanuts, because we want to save money.

Do you see a pattern emerging here?

It is the greed and avarice of the average British consumer that has caused the demise of British manufacturing, not just of food but of all such goods. We want them quickly and cheaply, so we get them in from those lands full of brown people. We like it that way. We collude with big business in that way.

So when you're attacking the big business that you don't trust, is it not just the rage of Caliban at seeing his reflection in a mirror?

I don't disagree with you, if I'd have gone on for a few more pages then I'd probably have come to exactly the same points. I'm perfectly aware that mega consumerism is the problem and personally I try to do everything within my power as ethical a consumer as possible... but it's not easy to win people over, especially if you take an aggressive tone with them.

You might like this. Really

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GorqroigqM

vaporate

Toffs avoiding tax is more interesting...shifting public attention.

UK armed forces is a joke now too with cuts lol Let's hope no country starts a war. UK Gov kissing Americas !!!! wont help either lmao.

bo_drinker

It's not the junkies and chavs they are on about, it's people taking because they can and it becomes an addiction so they take some more.