I’m a Gen Z student shoplifter. Here’s why I do it

It’s Wednesday lunchtime, I’ve just completed my morning university lectures and I’m in M&S, musing over what to get for lunch. I move through the meal deals aisle, idly picking up wholewheat wraps, fluorescent packaged mango and some kefir-based drink. I am long past checking the prices, but I assume they wouldn’t come to less than £6. Tucking them under my arm I go to the café area. “Black Americano please,” I say with my not-conducting-a-small-organic-heist smile. I pay £2.50 for my coffee and walk out. As I pass the security guards I hold my breath, exhaling only as I rejoin the crowd on the street. I have shoplifted again and got away with it.

I must have been about 13 when I first toyed with the idea that things could, perhaps, be free. Everyone was starting to wear make-up, and my Saturday job couldn’t fund the amount of bronzer required for male attention. I remember the giddy feeling of expecting a Swat team but walking away silently with a bag full of Maybelline. I was brought up in a boarding school environment, often lacking real excitement, with middle-class parents who regularly implored me to stop nicking biscuits and eyeliner. They thought my stealing was all about teenage angst — they have no idea I am still at it.

As I’ve got older I can afford my make-up (and wear slightly less bronzer), so mostly stick to food. My reasoning has moved away from pure thrill-seeking. It now feels like two fingers up to the big corporations that have been upping prices under the guise of the cost of living crisis or using charitable donations at self-checkouts as tax breaks. I further justify it by making sure never to steal from independent shops or to nab anything worth more than £10. Many light-fingered friends of mine follow the same doctrine.

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Take James, who, like me, is 23 and a student. He told me that because a bookshop didn’t give him a job he stole a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus. James and I are far from alone. When the subject was raised during a class at the Russell Group university I attend almost all the young women admitted that they regularly shoplift, and all offered the same justification: only from big corporations.

Last year more than a quarter of a million shoplifters went unnoticed, and there seems to be a burgeoning moral panic, but what do you think when you see a shoplifter? The increasing number of articles on shoplifting are accompanied by CCTV footage of people smashing their way in or people who are vulnerable or homeless. It doesn’t suit people’s prejudice to accept that there is not one archetype of a shoplifter.

If you’re reading this with disgust, wondering how we sleep at night, I ask you to look at the world from the perspective of people my age. When I was 16 the Brexit referendum took place. I couldn’t vote but am constantly told about the disastrous impact it is having. I spent most of my undergraduate degree in a lockdown watching the government flout the rules they were fining my peers thousands of pounds for breaking. We are constantly told that we’re too young to understand, that social media is making us horrible, that we’re going to be living in a fiery inferno by the time we’re 40 and that none of us is going to be able to buy a house. The feeling that we aren’t being shortchanged is hard to find outside the pilfering of an £8 bottle of olive oil.

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On Tuesday Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, announced at the retail trade union Usdaw’s annual conference that he was “putting shoplifters on notice”. His party has promised to reverse the Tory’s “shoplifter’s charter”, under which shoplifting offences under £200 aren’t investigated. If the law changed and there was a real chance of punishment I suspect I would think twice about my vigilante campaign against the powers that be. Now though I shoplift because it’s easy and, frankly, as a young white woman I can get away with it. I can continue undetected since there is no investigation into shoplifters outside the media-fuelled cultural imagination.

It is easy to dismiss me as another privileged member of Gen Z who should stop with the self-righteousness and do some work. Maybe, but there is no denying the mass youth disenfranchisement going on. We are constantly told that the UK is on its knees, that life is only getting harder and that we’re more likely to be struck by lightning thrice than get a mortgage. The generations before me have stolen my future. All I am stealing is some fancy muesli.

So the next time you see a doe-eyed twentysomething in a sundress mincing around the cheese aisle, look a bit closer. Where you see theft, others may see a rational act of rebellion.
The writer’s name has been changed. No payment has been made for this article