‘She was dressing half of Brixton at one time.’ A former plumber from south London is recalling the pretty, well-groomed shoplifter of his youth. Expensively dressed, her favourite place to target was Selfridges. ‘I don’t know how she did it but she got everything. You put in an order and she’d get it. Those days I had silk boxer shorts to give away,’ he sighs. ‘But then her son got murdered and she died shortly after of a broken heart.’

Shoplifting is no longer a one-woman show. Light-fingered mothers have been replaced by organised criminals, trafficking children and teenage girls from eastern Europe to steal from British shops. Children are a key part of their strategy because they are too young to be charged. Police forces in Lancashire, Merseyside and South Yorkshire have seen five-year-olds used.

‘Criminals are being given a free pass to attack us. You don’t expect to risk your life for a part-time job at Tesco’ 

This new breed of shoplifter has led to an explosion in the number of thefts, from 1.1 million to 5.6 million in just a year. British retailers now suffer a staggering 600 thefts an hour. Dame Sharon White, the chair of the John Lewis Partnership, has said that last year the company faced a £12 million increase in shoplifting. ‘In the last year we have moved on from “I’m going to put an extra six eggs in my basket, I haven’t paid for them but actually my family’s struggling” to organised crime gangs shoplifting to order in a way I find profoundly shocking.’

One Romanian gang, the Morrisons Marauders, used foil-lined bags to steal at least £65,000 worth of goods from Morrisons supermarkets across Britain. They picked goods they could sell on quickly for big profits, targeting alcohol, cosmetics, ink cartridges and electric toothbrush heads. The gang was highly mobile. They struck at least 47 times over eight months in 26 counties, stripping shelves bare of favoured items in a dizzying number of branches from Yorkshire to the south-west of England, the Midlands to Wales.

When police finally arrested one of the gang, Robert-Claudiu Alexe, he proved to be young and presentable, with fashionable stubble and dark wavy hair. Police found a collection of chocolates, pharmaceuticals and beard trimmers worth more than £12,000 in his home and car. He had previous convictions for theft in Germanyand Denmark. This habitual and international shoplifter was sentenced to just 27 months.

Maxine Fraser, of Retailers Against Crime, confirms that when gang members like Alexe are jailed for shoplifting, it is never for long. On release, they disappear out of the country: ‘Then back they come about a year later, often with a different name, a new passport, and start again.’ Richard Walker, the executive chairman of Iceland Foods, says sadly: ‘It’s become an almost unpunishable crime.’

Retailers Against Crime identified one gang in Glasgow that employs 154 shoplifters, including 15 children. Another 100-strong gang covers London and the south-east. Its members are almost all women from Eastern Europe, says Adam Ratcliffe, a former police officer who runs the Safer Business Network. According to Ratcliffe, the thieves target ‘cosmetic stores, going after fragrance, high-value face creams and make-up’. Unlike British shoplifters, who tend to stay local, foreign gangs travel around the country. They are difficult to catch because once they’ve left the shop, they’ve gone for good. Many steal expensive items to sell or ship abroad.

International gangs are targeting the UK because it is comparatively rich and poorly policed. ‘There are no consequences,’ says Fraser. The Co-op, for example, says police fail to show up in four fifths of cases – even those where shop workers have detained the criminals. But, says Fraser, ‘we can’t blame it all on the police. We seem to forget there’s a judiciary that is not giving out tough enough sentences.’

No wonder these gangs are brazen to the point of insult. I heard one story that when two thieves discovered a store had sold out of the gin they had come in to steal, they said cheerfully: ‘Don’t worry, we will be back on Monday because we know you’ll stock up over the weekend.’ ‘Sometimes,’ said a young man in Tower Hamlets, ‘I feel I am the only person in my local convenience store who actually pays for anything.’

The lack of policing has also led to a surge in violence. A young woman in south London recalled watching a man in her local Boots sweeping shelves of goods into a bag. When a security guard tried to stop him, ‘he went wild. It was very frightening. The guard was trembling and I felt so sorry for him.’

High-street shop workers are being attacked with knives, screwdrivers and hypodermic needles. ‘I have never seen anything like it,’ says Fraser. The British Retail Consortium notes that abuse and violence against staff has risen from 450 incidents a day in 2019/20 to more than 1,300 instances last year. New figures released last month by the Co-op showed that its stores have suffered 300,000 incidents of shoplifting, abuse, violence and antisocial behaviour in 2023 – an extraordinary 44 per cent increase from the year before. These include more than 1,120 physical assaults. When I spoke to one shop worker, he shrugged. ‘Criminals are being given a free pass to empty stores and attack us,’ he says. ‘You don’t expect to risk your life for a part-time job at Tesco.’

Shoplifting may still be seen as petty but there is nothing trivial about the crime. Stolen baby wipes and batteries now fund the same groups that smuggle drugs and guns into the country. ‘Don’t think it’s a victimless crime either,’ says Fraser. ‘Shop workers are the first to suffer.’ Heavy losses mean stores are forced to cut hours or close altogether. Almost £1 billion was lost to shoplifting in the UK last year.

One worker remarks bitterly: ‘First we risked our lives during the pandemic to serve the public. Now we’re risking them again in a losing war against shoplifters.’ It’s almost enough to make you miss the old-fashioned world of pilfered silk boxers.