Fort Knox is full of gold bars. Pork Knox is full of sausage rolls.
Sausage rolls are tasty British savory snacks, consisting, as the name implies, of a single sausage rolled up inside a layer of pastry. They are extremely inexpensive, often under £1.00. And now they are being placed under lock and key. With shoplifting across the UK having become so endemic, branches of the popular budget bakery chain Greggs have been forced to redesign their stores countrywide so that it is no longer possible to walk in and pick items off the shelves. Customers must instead ask for buns and biscuits to be carefully retrieved from behind a thick Perspex counter by staff in measures previously reserved for protecting expensive diamond necklaces in a jewelry store.
To lose one sausage roll may be considered unfortunate; but to lose thousands looks like carelessness. One thief alone, the 39-year-old Adam Gosling, struck a single Greggs branch in West London 38 separate times over six weeks, stealing a full £1,817 worth of items before police bothered to do anything. And, when the law finally did act, he didn’t even receive a custodial sentence. Nicknamed “Hamster” by staff, due to his propensity for stuffing his cheeks with free food, shopworkers knew perfectly well what Gosling was up to, but felt constrained by company policy from doing anything to halt him, limiting themselves to standing right next to him whilst he “worked” in the hope this would shame him into stopping. It didn’t.
Another congenital London klepto, a 17-year-old boy who cannot be named because of his alleged “vulnerability,” got away with lifting nearly £140,000 worth of goods from high street drugstores before finally being dealt with. When his grandfather discovered what he had been up to and told him he could go to prison for such activities, the boy declared himself “shocked” by this information—he genuinely had not realized there were any legal consequences to awarding yourself a five-fingered discount. The practice was so common amongst his friends that he thought this was just how shopping worked. With store-theft now being so widespread across Britain, you can actually see how he may have come to this conclusion.
Latest figures show 2025 was a record year for UK shoplifting, with 530,643 offenses officially recorded; as many shopkeepers don’t bother reporting thefts anymore as they know cops will do basically nothing, we can presume the true figure is much higher. Current laws are often interpreted, slightly incorrectly, as meaning it is essentially legal to shoplift items under £200 in one go. Entire families are now heading for fun days out, loading their trolleys full of bounty, and simply walking out of shop doors openly, safe in the presumed knowledge nobody will try and stop them. Any sensible security guards certainly won’t.
Several recent high-profile cases have emerged of store guards being sacked, following decades of loyal service, after daring to try and confront brazen robbers in contradiction to official store policy. Walker Smith, who wasted his life at the Waitrose supermarket chain for 17 long years, was fired last month after throwing a small piece of chocolate vaguely towards a thief who had filched a bagful of luxury Easter eggs. Following this highly dangerous and violent action, Smith was himself thrown “out the back door by the bins” with all the other rubbish, human or otherwise.
Smith alleges that, although shoplifting at his branch was becoming ever worse, Waitrose’s counterintuitive response was to cut back on security staff. The worse the problem gets, the less it can be tackled. Thieves in Britain now have more “human rights” than their victims, and the prospect of them suing for “assault” after being detained was more trouble to retail bosses than losing a few Easter eggs and then adding the hidden cost onto law-abiding customers’ bills, it appeared.
Morality and common sense have increasingly been outsourced towards inflexible procedure. The way British stores are now (mis)managed is a microcosm of how the wider country itself is now (mis)managed too. Adherence to predefined procedure is all, even if the procedure makes no sense. Just as a store manager can be sacked for “manhandling” a criminal who he thinks might be reaching for a weapon, so an immigrant who breaks into the country and rapes a schoolgirl can be given indefinite leave to remain; the procedure of following human rights law is considered by high-ups to be much more important than the rape. The true crimes in lawyer-led Britain are now always deviations from procedure by law-enforcers, not the actual initial crimes at all.
Because of such baleful trends, the Security Industry Federation trade union has strongly advised all members to literally no longer bother even doing their jobs, warning “do not put yourselves in harm’s way for those [employers] who may not support you afterwards.” Under a new ultra-cautious corporate regime of “deter not detain,” security guards have been reduced to the humiliating status of living scarecrows—but if the criminals all know the guards are only there to “deter not detain,” then they automatically lose all power to deter at all in the first place, don’t they?
In one store near me, a life-sized two-dimensional cardboard cut-out policeman stands useless and immobile by the sliding front entrance-doors, as a “warning” against largely non-existent consequences. I have often wondered what there would be to prevent someone just walking straight in there and stealing it, to highlight the absurdity of the whole situation. But then, if he did, the satirist would probably be immediately arrested after all, for committing a “thought-crime.”
So normalized has shoplifting become that it isn’t only drug-addicts and Romanians who are doing it anymore. Archie Norman, chairman of the upmarket department store franchise Marks & Spencer, points out that “normally good, honest people” from the middle-classes are using the chain’s new self-service checkouts, finding some products don’t scan properly, and just walking off with them, as they don’t have the time to faff around getting the tech to work properly. Everyone else is at it, so why shouldn’t they be too?
The prime minister has announced a supposed crackdown on the crime wave, but it doesn’t seem too likely to work, as his proposed new measures simply don’t seem harsh enough. Besides repealing the old perceived “£200 rule,” the Government merely plans to introduce new “Respect Orders” to ban prolific offenders from town centers. What if they don’t respect them?
Even simple shelf fare like bars of chocolate and tubs of butter are now being placed inside clear plastic security tag containers which set alarms ringing whenever thieves try to pass through exit doors, not simply high-cost items like razor blades and ink cartridges. Inexpensive staples like jars of instant coffee and boxes of detergent now appear on shelves as empty “display only” dummy packages, to be taken to checkouts and exchanged for the real stuff by staff.
Yet some consumers are not receptive to stores’ plight. Hearing the Co-Op supermarket chain had imprisoned chocolate treats inside tagged plastic, one shopper complained that “I feel like people not being able to afford £1.50 chocolate is a bigger issue than whatever … they [the store owners] think they’re solving. Not very ‘co-operative’ of them.” Property is theft, it seems—so steal it!
Exploiting a general anti-business mood, left-wing excuse-makers have been pushing the line that, contrary to initial common sense appearances, the stores are the true criminals here, and the shoplifters the true victims. On his very first day in the job, the quasi-Marxist leader of the UK Green Party, Zack Polanski, gave an interview to the BBC, weeping that, if he were living in poverty, he too would resort to shoplifting his daily bottle of methylated spirits, warning against the oppressive fascist police-state “criminalizing poverty” by prosecuting offenders, even though low-level offenders very rarely are prosecuted at all.
“I’m not justifying shoplifting,” Zack said, justifying shoplifting, before adding that “there should be consequences” for it, just so long as these amounted to no real consequences at all.
Polanski’s Green Party Joint-Deputy Leader, Rachel Millward, thinks excessively high prices in wicked, capitalist supermarkets have responsibility for fueling even greater crimes than shoplifting; she thinks they can make people kill Jews. Following the recent attempted knife-murder of two Jews in the Golders Green area of London by an insane black Muslim immigrant, Millward was asked where she thought all the antisemitism sweeping the nation was coming from. She said she thought it was coming from Tesco: “We live in rip-off Britain. And people are having a really, really tough time…. They’re struggling because food is now so expensive it’s eye-watering…. What that means is that there’s a tendency to find someone to blame.”
Perhaps the real people to blame for rising prices are those like Millward and Polanski who make endless apologies for shoplifting in the first place; research indicates stores add an extra £133 onto the average shopper’s bill per annum to help recoup costs incurred from stolen goods. Claiming Muslim terrorists are motivated primarily by a year-on-year, Jew-stoked increase in the price of family-packs of Oreos has to be one of the stupidest conspiracy theories ever advanced. The only Jew I’ve ever wanted to stab in the face after visiting an overpriced supermarket is Zack Polanski himself.
In such a hopeless environment, the only recourse left to some desperate shopkeepers is: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Some small retailers have begun employing thieves to shoplift goods wholesale from rivals and sell them on to them for low, low prices, so they can then offer customers the very best deals in their turn. The Greens would be delighted: The circular economy in action.
“Shoplifters of the world, unite and take over!” the great English rockstar Morrissey once sang. At this point, it seems they already have.
Read the full article here
