If you want evidence that the shoplifting epidemic in the UK has got out of hand, take a trip to Mackay, a hardware shop in Cambridge. Here, the padlocks are kept in a cabinet, which itself is padlocked.
“It’s ironic, isn’t it?” says Neil Mackay, 69, the fourth generation from his family to own the shop, which has been operating on the same site since 1912.
“Or maybe the thieves need padlocks to secure all the stuff they’ve stolen?”, quips one of his workers from the other side of the shop.
Padlocking the padlocks is just one of many measures Mackay has had to take in the wake of fairly relentless attacks by criminals in the last couple of years. He refuses to call them shoplifters. “It’s a word that makes it sound as though it’s a lesser crime,” he says firmly. He prefers “shop theft”.
At first sight, this may look like a genteel ironmonger of the type immortalised by The Two Ronnies’ “Four Candles” sketch of the 1970s – indeed Ronnie Barker was a customer of Mackay’s – selling balls of twine, dustpan and brushes and 3p nuts. But it also sells serious and expensive kit, including £450 drilling machines and £541 ladders.
Power tools were stolen in the most costly recent raid, with £4,000 worth of kit taken from near the front of the shop by a team of three men, who used pliers to cut through the security wiring attaching them to a display stand. “They probably stole the cutters from us,” Mackay says wryly.
His humour fails him, however, when he explains the financial and wider impact the crimes have on his business.
“They are professional thieves, who are organised and determined. And on average you have to sell another 12 of those items just to make your money back.” That’s because profit margins are low in hardware, as in most retail. “It’s just a massive additional cost to business and a huge disincentive to trade in the way we do.”
A lot of stock, even basic screwdrivers, are now security locked to the shelves, other products are stored in closed cabinets, and some of the most expensive items, such as power tools, have been moved to behind a counter. All of this means the traditional experience of wandering around a shop and discovering a great little tool or gadget is fading.
“The whole atmosphere and ambience of what we are offering is diminished. It’s very sad,” he says.
Mackay’s despair is shared by many shopkeepers up and down Britain – from those running their own corner shops to those in charge of large chains.
A House of Lords inquiry in November found that shoplifting is at “unacceptable” levels nationally. The crime is vastly under-reported and the problem is so urgent that police forces need to take “immediate action”, the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee concluded.
How bad is it? The British Retail Consortium is due to release its annual retail crime report on January 30, and the figures are likely to show “a dramatic worsening on last year”, according to a source.
A year ago, it reported the overall cost of retail crime had almost doubled to £3.3bn. This included £1.8bn of goods stolen and £1.2bn spent on crime prevention measures, such as increased security guards, body-worn cameras for staff or reinforced glass around the tills.
Shopkeepers have always had to contend with a bit of stealing – what the trade euphemistically calls “shrinkage”. But nearly all retail bosses say it has become significantly worse in the last couple of years.
“When we first came here, we had four or five incidents a week, now we’re finding it can be as many as four or five incidents a day,” says Benedict Selvaratnam, 40, who has been a shopkeeper for 20 years and has run his family business, Freshfields Market in Croydon, for eight years. It is a classic convenience store selling fresh food, toiletries, household cleaning items and the like. “What I am facing in Croydon town centre is the worst it’s ever been.”
He says violence towards staff is becoming an issue too. “It’s really disheartening – not knowing how bad each day is going to be, not being able to leave staff members running the shop alone.”
He used to employ three staff each shift, but this has now increased to four or five, to increase security. “We’re losing hundreds of pounds a week and thousands of pounds a month, and that’s not including the money we’ve spent on various security measures. We spent £10,000 on security glass around the till area, because we were being jumped.”
That has proved only a partial success. “About three weeks ago a group of about 10 school kids managed to get their hands behind the security glass and nick a few hundred pounds worth of buzz vapes [disposable ones].”
Another retail euphemism is “defensive merchandising” – the tactics retail bosses use to deter criminals. At Morrisons there is a “buzz for booze” button, which customers have to press to unlock high-value spirits; Aldi resorted to putting up signs at some of its stores: “steaks available by request”.
Similarly, at some outlets the Co-op has taken the £4.50 jars of instant coffee and £2.75 packs of Lurpak spreadable butter off the shelves, replacing them with signs saying: “If you require any of these products, please ask a member of staff. Sorry for any inconvenience.”
Even more drastic is when you stop selling an item. That’s what Selvaratnam has had to do with baby formula. “Baby formula kept being nicked, so it was just easier for us to de-list it,” he says, using the term for no longer stocking an item. “It’s really sad – if you’re a young mum and it’s nine o’clock at night and you need baby formula, we have to let her down, unfortunately, because we can’t afford to keep it because of the shoplifters.”
What’s driving such high levels of shoplifting? The fact that necessities such as butter, coffee and baby formula are being stolen suggests that the cost of living crisis has caused a lot of desperate consumers to resort to crime.
Donald Nairn, 50, the owner of Toys Galore in Edinburgh, say:, “Saying it’s [because of] the cost of living crisis is just a cop-out. It’s criminals taking advantage of the police not making it a priority. They’ve worked out that it’s an easy way to make money. Toys Galore is an old-school toy shop in Morningside that has been targeted a couple of times in recent months, with one incident just before Christmas involving the manager being attacked, leaving her with bruises.
“It’s definitely got worse in the last six months or so; it used to be quite trivial – junkies stealing to get their next fix, but now it’s far more organised.”
His view that organised gangs are behind a lot of the crime is backed up by experts. Prof Emmeline Taylor, professor of criminology at City St George’s, says: “We now have completely brazen thieves. They’re not trying to hide things in their pockets. They’re walking out with a trolley full of goods.”
Taylor spent time with offenders to find out more about their methods and motives. “The criminals run it like a business. At the moment it is a low-risk, high-reward enterprise. Once it goes back to being high-risk, low-reward, they’ll go back to stealing freight, counterfeit tobacco and the like.”
The reason it is low-risk is that the police are just not interested, according to shopkeepers. “They don’t attend 70%, 75% of the incidents when you call them,” says Selvaratnam.
Back in 2023, the Co-op submitted Freedom of Information requests to all police forces. Two-thirds of forces replied, and the information revealed that in 71% of cases where police were called to a store, they did not respond.
“And, when you are being confronted by someone possibly violent, you can’t necessarily get on the phone to the police, who may or may not come. It’s just not practical. It’s just not worth the time and the effort,” Selvaratnam continues.
And the reason it is high reward is because criminals can offload their stolen goods more easily than ever. “It used to be the case that they would go down the local pub with a bin bag, or sell it at a car boot or market stall. But there are now far more digital avenues,” explains Taylor. “If someone is selling five packets of Persil washing powder on Facebook Marketplace or eBay, I think you can be fairly certain that’s stolen goods.”
When it comes to fresh food, such as cheese and steaks, these are often sold to unscrupulous retailers or restaurants prepared to turn a blind eye in order to source cheap stock. She adds that most thieves can receive one-third to a half of the retail price for any item, depending on the quantity they have.
Taylor says that though the bulk of crime is being committed by gangs, there is a lot by individuals stealing to fund their drug habits.
“One offender I spoke to needs £500 every day just to fund his habit,” says Taylor. “If he’s getting just one-third of the retail price, that means he needs to steal £1,500 of goods. If you think about this happening up and down the country, that’s an eye-watering sum of money.”
Those with substance abuse addictions tend not to use a “fence” to sell their goods. “There’s a woman I have come across who takes in stock at the back door of her flat and sells it out the front door. In some cases, the thieves stay with her and the rent she charges is stolen goods,” she adds.
The rise of middle-class thieves plays a role too, thanks to the prevalence of self-scan tills in shops. “People use ideological justifications – ‘I’m not paid to work in Sainsbury’s, so why am I doing this checkout that somebody used to get paid for?’” Taylor explains.
“What’s really interesting is that there’s been a shift: it used to be shameful if you’d stolen a bottle of olive oil from Sainsbury’s. That’s certainly not something you would ever tell your friends or family about. But it’s almost become a bit of a sport – ‘you won’t believe how I put some salmon through as bananas!’ There’s a certain pleasure that’s derived from it. As criminologists, we know that a lot of crime is done through that sort of pleasure-seeking, voluntary risk-taking.”
One in eight adults (13%) said they had selected a cheaper item on a self-service till than the one they were buying, according to a recent poll conducted by Ipsos.
Regardless of the type of thief, all retailers point to a failure by police to take the crime seriously enough. Part of the problem is that following the 2014 Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act, shoplifting was, in effect, downgraded. Any offence where the items were valued at less than £200 would be tried in a magistrates court with the punishment liable to be, at most, a fine.
Andrew Goodacre is the chief executive of the British Independent Retailers Association (Bira). “Why have we got this industrial scale of stuff going on? The mixture of the lack of police and then the lack of prosecution. It has made it look like an easy crime,” he says.
Stuart Rose, the chairman of Asda and former chief executive of Marks & Spencer, said in an interview last year that shoplifting had become virtually decriminalised.
“The authorities just do not take shoplifting seriously. Forty years ago when I was a manager at Marks & Spencer Marble Arch, the police would turn up. Now they don’t even answer the telephone.”
The new government announced that it intended to reverse this £200 rule in the King’s Speech last year. In November, the policing minister, Diana Johnson, confirmed the move: “It is simply not right to leave business and retail workers at the mercy of criminals. We will therefore remove the £200 threshold and treat shoplifting with the seriousness that it deserves.”
At his shop in Cambridge, Neil Mackay is dubious this will help. “The last three home secretaries have all said the same thing. It doesn’t change the fact that the local priorities are set by the local police and crime commissioner.”
Some police forces have started to invest time and resources in tackling shoplifting, notably in Sussex, where the police and crime commissioner, Katy Bourne, has insisted retail crime is worth taking seriously. “My view is that shoplifting is a gateway crime. Pretty much every criminal starts somewhere, and they usually start shoplifting,” she says. “If you don’t tackle it at source, when it starts to happen, it will increase.”
Even an 85p Mars Bar? Yes, she insists. “It comes with fear for the shopkeeper, for the shop worker, for the members of the public who have witnessed it. On the other side of the coin, for the person who has stolen, if they don’t get challenged, if they don’t get reported, they get more emboldened, and that forces them on to more criminality.”
One of her solutions has been to make it far easier for shopkeepers to report shoplifting, by using a secure messaging system, similar to WhatsApp, which allows retailers to upload CCTV pictures. “We’ve taken it down from being half an hour to literally taking them two minutes to do. It’s almost at the touch of a button. It goes straight into police systems. There’s the report done, then get back to work.”
The downside of making it easier to report, she acknowledges, is that crime figures will go up. But she says she’s relaxed about that as long as the police can then focus their efforts on catching the serious and repeat offenders.
She was also instrumental in setting up Operation Pegasus, a scheme initially funded by a group of big retailers including Tesco, Primark, Aldi, B&Q and Co-op, which has tried to crack down on the worst of organised criminal gangs – defined as those working across different police forces.
It started operating in the summer of 2024 and involved retailers and police liaising more closely, sharing CCTV footage and analysing data. It has had some early successes, with 93 offenders arrested. So far, 32 of the 93 arrested offenders have appeared in court, and five have been deported.
“I’m delighted,” says Bourne. “It’s absolutely making a difference. We’ve seen that with the number of arrests coming through.”
It is also proof that with a concerted effort some criminals, at least, can be stopped. But without further serious improvements many retailers say the depressed state of the high street is only going to get worse.
“I really worry for the next generation of entrepreneurs and businessmen and women who want to open a shop,” says Selvaratnam. “Why would they take on a business on the high street, with all the costs of business rates, rents, when they have to physically protect their stock and man their doors because the police may not come when people brazenly come in to steal their stock. Why would you take on that aggro?”
Indeed, Donald Nairn who runs the toy shop in Edinburgh is questioning whether he will renew his lease when it comes up for renewal. “It does suck the fun out of it. It means you have to treat everyone who comes into your shop as a potential criminal. And that’s horrible.”
Harry Wallop is a journalist, broadcaster and author
