“We, who are thieves without a licence, are at open war with another set of men who are thieves according to law.” 

- William Godwin, Caleb Williams

“I could have begged, but it’s degrading and cowardly and even punished by your laws, which make poverty a crime. If all those in need, instead of waiting took, wherever and by whatever means, the self-satisfied would understand perhaps a bit more quickly that it’s dangerous to want to consecrate the existing social state, where worry is permanent and life threatened at every moment.”

- Ravachol

deep pocketed; go past, walk in, barriers, sliding doors, air conditioning, guards, mind your own, walk like anyone would, into, in- wispa gold. a jar of something. acrylic paints. lipstick. condoms. in a tote bag, up a sleeve, just holding it- is dishonesty really so bad when you’re dishonest to Asda?- frozen aisle, cold gnaws at you, relieves you, sharpens you- blind-spots, cameras that don’t tell you where they’re looking, mirrors, que, queue, queueue, self-checkout, don’t scan half, most, all of it, bagged, hungover machine attendant doesn’t see, doesn’t care, through the gates, they don’t beep, they beep and you run, they beep and you act confused, glance at a security guard aimlessly wandering around, goes towards you, shouts, does nothing, you’re not causing a scene, run, walk, earphones in, you didn’t hear, out, out of, free, free shit, everything you need, want, crave; when the world costs nothing, it tastes better. 

They Invent New Poverties Every Day

Sometimes I just want everything. Advertisements make a toy out of desire, they play with the overstimulation of hunger, thirst, they put everything before you, just close enough not to hold. Want is a game; it toys with children, the bright lights in between cartoons, like you could just reach in and grab it, take it out, scatter it along your carpet and rip it to pieces. Billboards throw the fruits of labour and land, property and proletarian, across the public psyche; private property is propelled, at breakneck speed, across phone screens and airwaves, cluster bombs of images and text. You’re saturated with everything, a kind of mad irrigation which grows an insipid crop of dull desire along the banks of your consciousness.

When selling private property, there is a strained double incentive; to protect it, and to make it desirable. To pull you in and push you back. Turgid desire floods the system in the form of floodlit symbols, whilst you are left acutely aware of cameras on every aisle, of neon yellow figures scattered before automatic doors. 

Everywhere we go, we are surrounded by an abundance of theft. The IMF recently admitted that many retailers were soaring their prices way (way) higher than they “had” to, with profits making up more than half of inflation. The money we’re paying extra isn’t primarily rising gas prices, it’s profit. Major UK employers were also very recently found to be engaging in mass wage theft, stealing millions from its workers, constantly, with impunity. Businesses have concocted a crisis designed to cripple its workers and its customers, who walk through a maze of fake deals and vastness, only to reach the checkout and find themselves falling deeper and deeper into poverty, victims of their own earnestness against the dishonesty
of retailers.

These poverties we live in are invented, organised, concocted in a thousand pots and spilt in-discriminately into the inner-city blues, the postindustrial suburbs, sub-saharan slums and prison archipelagos. Poverties of clean air, poverties of health, poverties of wealth, of time, poverties of space, of water, of food, of education, of mobility; all are top-down choices. Scarcity is a violent invention, a trillion dollar industry. To have everything dangled in your face, whilst so little is allocated to you, is a mockery, is theft. Who else makes these things but us? To produce so much, without any access to it; for the world to be sectioned off into private land until there is nowhere to sit without purchasing it, nowhere to sleep without renting, nowhere to love without being watched. Sometimes I want everything- because everything is mine, is yours, is ours- is taken.

Am I a victim or a perpetrator?

The way the upsurge in shoplifting has been reported is captivating. It’s some kind of debate between liberal and conservative pundits, proposing two different ideas of the shoplifter- the liberal’s good shoplifter, and the conservative’s bad shoplifter. The Guardian, in a recent piece about shoplifting in a Manchester suburb, promoted an idea that the battle to understand these people takes two sides. One, that shoplifters are desperate, poverty stricken, otherwise normal individuals, and another, that shoplifters are nearly always  simply dangerous criminals. “There have been many media reports of “ordinary” people stealing because of the cost of living crisis. This idea is rejected by many retail experts,” wrote Helen Pidd. 

How “ordinary” a shoplifter is is a completely unmeasurable thing; how are you defining ordinariness, and then how are you testing each shoplifter for normality? Perhaps you mean unwilling thieves; people who do not want to steal, but do it out of necessity. The good shoplifter, the thief who is simply a victim of circumstance. Perhaps you are trying to find the perfect thief, the thief who hates every minute of what they do, is filled with fear, and afterwards, guilt and shame at their act. Perhaps by ordinary, you mean they would otherwise obey the law, because otherwise they would respect the right of supermarkets to hoard wealth we create, only to sell it back to us. “Ordinary,” here, is a word that does a lot of work. They are ordinary because they respect the law and capital; yet they are in the extraordinary position of poverty. But who put them in this position of poverty, if not the law and capital? Should I respect the bodies which steal my wages and force me into poverty through unreasonable inflation? Would that make me ordinary- would that make me forgivable, helpable, pitiable?

The conservative’s bad, extraordinary shoplifter, on the other hand, is the willing thief, the thief wrapped up with desire, to make money, as part of organised criminal gangs devoted to flogging discount steaks to daydrinkers at the local. The shoplifter who is likely to resort to violence if caught, the greedy, egocentric shoplifter who is crippling the economy, who the police don’t arrest enough, whose nicking of snickers means that workers are being laid off and franchises shut down left right and centre. Shoplifters historically have been executed, deported to penal colonies; their hands have been chopped off, they have been branded, documented, stigmatised to the highest degree. The “bad shoplifter” is the image thrown about in the papers, on the television, and dances frantically, manically in the psyches of the legislators, along the corridors of lobbyists and the offices of bureaucrats. It’s this image that the Conservatives use as a justification to attempt to roll out surveillance state facial recognition technologies to major UK supermarkets, or ensure prison time for repeat offenders, two measures they’re supposedly trying to make happen in the coming years.

It is the image of The Shoplifter, and the psychic, spiritual, moral, physical taboos created around them, that draws the line between the inside and the outside of the retailer, that creates and solidifies the idea of private property which organises the exploitation of our world. All of these myriad rituals of punishment, concocted by parliaments, monarchs, churches, and their financiers, reinforce the boundaries of private property. If I leave with this item in my hand, without paying for it, I am The Shoplifter, The Criminal, am no longer Ordinary, and can expect to be treated as such, because this thing is Theirs and not Mine. The shoplifter (as all thieves do) attacks and disrespects the boundaries between Ours and Theirs. The offensive upon The Shoplifter tries to reinforce the boundary the shoplifter disrespects, by making their crime something inherently immoral, illegal, and reprehensible. No time is spared for the idea that they may be in the right.

In the recent HBO hit Succession, there was a confusing subplot wherein Kendall, the mentally ill addict son of a media baron, at a low point, begins to compulsively shoplift. Rumour of this spreads, and soon his whole family is speaking about it behind his back as they try to prove his insanity to each other. It’s a subplot which doesn’t really go anywhere; it seems the writers didn’t really know what to do with it. What it tries to indicate, as does any TV storyline involving shoplifting, is that if you do this, you will be found out, and will be labelled as deranged and morally compromised for doing so, and if your family and wealth can’t save you from prosecution (as Kendall’s can), you’ll be arrested, criminalised and incarcerated. It is this fetishisation of the act that creates a certain mythos around it, a sort of fairytale, a warning retold over and over again- and an inaccurate one. The Hays Code, a self-censoring document used by filmmakers in the USA for much of the 20th century which left a powerful legacy on the industry, created a censorship rule wherein criminals couldn’t be shown to get away with their misdeeds; they had to be brought under the law in the end. As such, real shoplifting, which is prolific and barely ever prosecuted, is swapped for a dreamworld where the shoplifter is evil and vicious, and the police are competent, everywhere, and will get you, eventually. 

The Shoplifter

The image of the shoplifter is a political tool, in this piece as in Hollywood. Truly, it is hard to find something more eroticised than the act of picking up something you need/want and leaving with it. The idea of the good shoplifter as a victim of the system, and the idea of the bad shoplifter as a perpetrator of crime and violence, both take this for granted; that the act itself is wrong. They debate between themselves as to how forgivable the crime is, but never stop to consider how forgivable those who hoard wealth are, who wrap our lives in plastic and decimate our planet, who steal from their minimum wage workforce and turn our basic needs into commodities. Who cares if I nick bourbons from Tesco? A heater from Wilco, some multivitamins from Holland & Barett, what kind of a dent is that to them? And if it is a dent to them- isn’t that a good thing? Shouldn’t we be attacking them from every front available, as a means of survival through resistance? What kind of a person would I be to give so much profit to businesses designed to decimate, impoverish and pollute? We are often told that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism- the contradiction being, of course, that I must consume; I have to live! Say it with me- I have to live! What if there was an ethical consumption under capitalism- to give them nothing, and to take it all- take it back? 

In 2022, there were 295,917 reported incidents of shoplifting in the UK- nearly five for every thousand people, a marked increase of 24% from the previous year. And this is only what is recorded by the police. And this is only incidents which are reported to the police- which many businesses neglect to do. However, it’s still a huge step down from pre-pandemic levels. Charges in the past decade were on decline- from 2013-17, arrests of shoplifters fell by 17%, and criminal charges fell by 25%. The police consistently do not engage with shoplifting offences below £200. 

Shoplifting is mainly policed privately by in-store security, and even then, most stores tell their colleagues not to engage with shoplifters, as there are two risks. One, that the confrontation escalates, and the shop assistant is injured, resulting in a costly lawsuit. Two, the person didn’t steal anything, resulting in- again- a costly lawsuit. The mythos painted around shoplifting, as criminals who are consistently caught, is exactly that- a myth. In many ways, we are seeing the soft legalisation of shoplifting. Nonetheless, the legal system still has its priorities in a mess- in 2022, 13.8% of shoplifting cases resulted in charges, whereas a staggering mere 1.3% of rape cases ended in charges. These charges are anything from minor fines or community service to, in rare and extreme instances, prison time. The maximum sentence for theft under £200 is six months in prison, and over £200 is seven years- however, you’re very unlikely to get a custodial sentence for a first time. 

The point is that the shoplifter is not the thief, but the expropriator. They do not steal, they take back. Shoplifting liberates objects from the commodity form; it recognises that this can, this fruit, this toy is no longer an item to be bought and sold, this is a good to be taken and distributed. When you enter a supermarket, what you are really seeing is the mass binding of nature and its fruits, captured through exploitative measures and brought to you to exploit you in turn. The shoplifter refuses to buy into this illusion. But shoplifters are not good people, or bad people, ordinary or extraordinary people, violent or nonviolent. Shoplifting is an act, not a type of person; it’s not a horoscope or a Myers-Briggs personality. For most shoplifters, shoplifting isn’t so much about why they shoplift, or whether it is justified, but simply how. How do I do this without getting caught?
It’s easier than you think.