THICK AS THIEVES

The number of middle-class people who rob shops is on the rise. Helen Coffey asks how and when stealing became the new socially acceptable pastime for the upwardly mobile

- Helen Coffey

"You wouldn't steal a car," the Noughties video piracy public service announcement infamously pointed out. "You wouldn't steal a handbag. You wouldn't steal a television." Twenty years on, it feels like many of us would steal just about anything else though.

Call me crazy, but I’ve always subscribed to the notion that nicking stuff is, well, wrong, and that the law is something that should largely be abided by in a civilised society. But these days, I increasingly feel like an outlier – a hopelessly naive hick amid a sea of otherwise upstanding citizens who believe they’re inherently entitled to a “five-finger discount” whenever they like. All the evidence seems to suggest that we’ve entered the era of the middle-class shoplifter.

I present to you exhibit A: an anonymous first-person piece recently featured in The Times, in which the writer confessed to stealing “a magazine here, a Mother’s Day card there, anything I felt I shouldn’t have to pay for.” The author in question, a Gen Z graduate in the first round of post-uni job hunting, justified this recently acquired criminal habit by framing it as the natural response to an overstretched budget. Yet in the same breath, they admitted: “It’s not as if I was Aladdin, stealing what I couldn’t afford. But I was stealing what I didn’t want to pay for.” Therein lies the distinction: “want”, not “need”. “Would not”, rather than “could not”.

Their first intentional theft was telling: a pain au chocolat. We’re hardly talking Les Mis’s Jean Valjean here, forced into snatching a hunk of bread to fend off starvation. No, what we’re looking at is a person who quite fancies a bougie pick-me-up pastry with their morning coffee, and believes that they deserve to have it for free. “Everything we desire is dangled like a carrot in front of us daily on social media – and we are not willing to wait for it. We are, after all, the impatient generation,” the writer concluded.