IN KEEPING with modern tradition, many thousands of us headed to the shops this week in the hope of bagging a bargain in the Boxing Day sales.
But for some people the challenge won’t be to see how little they can pay for their goods.
They will be determined to get away without paying at all.
Shoplifting has reached epidemic proportions in something-for-nothing post-pandemic Britain.
According to the British Retail Consortium, there were more than eight million cases of shoplifting last year, with £1BILLION of goods being spirited out of shops.
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That has nearly doubled since 2019.
It isn’t that shop assistants are too dozy to notice what’s going on.
It is the criminal justice system which is failing to punish the shoplifters.
Anyone who works in retail can tell you similar stories — of watching shoplifters remove goods from the shelves and staff being unable to do anything about it.
In the past year, more than 200,000 reported cases of shoplifting have gone unpunished — a 32 per cent rise on the previous 12 months.
That is 560 people every day who have been seen stealing goods but who the criminal justice system has failed to capture.
The Co-op alone says there have been 3,000 cases in its stores this year, where security guards managed to catch and detain thieves — and yet in four-fifths of those cases, police failed to turn up to arrest them.
It is no longer a case of someone furtively trying to sneak something out of shop beneath a long flowing overcoat.
Gangs are operating in the full glare of staff and CCTV cameras.
Shoplifters have become brazen because they know the chances of being captured are very slim.
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They are also becoming violent.
Last year the BRC recorded 850 cases a day where retail staff had been attacked or threatened with violence.
But if you think it is bad now, just wait for the Government’s moratorium on jail sentences of less than 12 months — a measure which has been dreamed up in the hope of reducing pressure on the prison population.
It is true that Britain’s prisons are desperately over- crowded.
Wandsworth Prison, for example, has “good and decent” accommodation for 950 inmates, yet in September it was housing 1,613.
But the solution is not simply to open the gates.
The biggest single beneficiaries of this ill-thought-out policy will be those few shoplifters who do get convicted, and who in future will face nothing harsher than a community sentence.
Some on the liberal left like to assert that people are only forced to steal from shops because they are poor and the welfare state has failed them.
We are fed a romantic image of shoplifters as unfortunate people who are simply trying to feed their families.
Yet the reality is more often one of pure greed — gangs of young men helping themselves to fancy trainers or large amounts of alcohol.
A gang whose members were finally jailed in November had succeeded in lifting £34,000 of beer, wines and spirits from supermarkets across Eastern England.
They weren’t poor wretches just trying to fill their kids’ tummies.
For far too long shoplifters have been allowed to think that theirs is a victimless crime, and that stores will recoup their losses through insurance policies.
But sorry, it isn’t victimless
Even if you lack sympathy for the likes of Tesco and Primark, not all shops are faceless chain stores.
Many businesses opening their shutters this week after the Christmas break are small independent stores into which entrepreneurial individuals have put a lifetime’s work.
It is hard enough for small shops to compete with the big stores and the internet as it is, without having their goods pilfered.
High Street stores, large and small, have been suffering for years as online shopping eats into their business.
But we will all be the losers if the shoplifting epidemic finally pushes them over the edge.
It will mean more scenes of town centre dereliction, and make it even harder for elderly people, who are less likely to be online, to buy what they need.
Shoplifting might seem a relatively minor crime alongside murder, rape and violence, yet there is a lot of evidence to suggest that shoplifting acts as a gateway to lives of more serious crime.
A decade ago the Home Office studied 220,000 criminals and found that 14 per cent of people who started off on minor acquisitive crime went on to become career criminals with more than 15 offences to their name.
In other words, by failing to punish shoplifters we are feeding a crime wave.
If we don’t have enough room in our prisons for shoplifters, what is so wrong with deporting foreign criminals to serve their sentences in their home countries, with their fingerprints and DNA taken so they can never return to live in Britain.
That would free up plenty of space.
In September this year there were 10,418 foreign nationals serving sentences in UK jails — one in eight of the prison population.
In spite of the shoplifting epidemic, most Brits remain honest people who want to work hard in return for a decent lifestyle.
But a society where mass theft is overlooked is one where the work ethic is going to end up severely weakened.
Government, police and the courts owe it to the country’s honest majority to get on top of shoplifting, before it is too late.