Flick 🇬🇧 on Nostr: I spoke to my favourite worker in my local supermarket, a cheerful and witty older ...

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/britain-is-now-a-nation-of-shoplifters/

I spoke to my favourite worker in my local supermarket, a cheerful and witty older gentleman I see most mornings, about the rise in shoplifting. He wears a body camera but is not allowed to caution any of the thieves who steal from his shop every day (anything from six to ten incidents, more at weekends). One regular is so brazen that he shouts ‘Same time tomorrow!’ as he leaves. I asked the worker if he thought replacing checkout workers with self-service machines had had anything to do with the rise in thieving and he answered immediately: ‘No – it was lockdown.’ I’d been thinking this too, but I’ve become such a loather of lockdown in retrospect – though I obeyed the rules at the time except the masking nonsense – that I couldn’t trust myself. I was pleased that someone with frontline experience of this post-pandemic social de-gradation felt the same as me, but also cross, because it could have been avoided if the government had had some guts. ‘People forgot how to interact decently with people and they’ve never relearned,’ he said.