San Francisco’s shoplifting epidemic is shocking to behold. But we shouldn’t imagine that the same couldn’t happen here. In fact, we’re well on our way. According to the British Retail Consortium, theft from stores across 10 UK cities is up by 26%. More, “incidents of violence and abuse against retail employees have almost doubled on pre-pandemic levels.”

On Tuesday, Asda Chairman Stuart Rose told LBC that “theft is a big issue. It has become decriminalised. It has become minimised. It’s actually just not seen as a crime anymore.”

In the absence of an adequate response from the authorities, retailers are beginning to take defensive measures. For instance, home furnishings company Dunelm is now locking up duvets and pillow cases in cabinets; Waitrose is offering free coffees to police officers to increase their visibility; and Tesco plans to equip staff with body cameras. 

The “progressive” response to this phenomenon isn’t quite as deranged as it is in in the US. Nevertheless, British liberals have responded as expected. A piece in the Observer is typical. You’ll never guess, but apparently it’s all the Tories’ fault: “Starving your population and then ‘cracking down’ on it for nicking baby formula or a can of soup can start to make a government look rather unreasonable.”

But as the writer ought to know, the issue here isn’t the desperate young mum hiding a few groceries in the pram. Nor is it the schoolboy pilfering the occasional bag of sweets. Rather, the real problem is blatant, organised and sometimes violent theft of higher value items. Criminals who never previously thought they could get away with it increasingly now do — thus presenting a material threat to retail as we know it. 

But instead of addressing the issue head-on, the writer blames the victim: “Once goods were kept behind counters, but since the birth of large supermarkets they have been laid out near the door, ready for the taking.” How terribly irresponsible of them! On the other hand, perhaps the open display of goods isn’t just a convenience for customers, but instead the hallmark of a high trust society. 

In fact, modern shops are a minor miracle of civilisation: public spaces, stacked high with products from all over the world, that passing strangers may freely inspect and handle, but which aren’t looted by anyone who feels like it.

Surely, that’s something worth defending. But if you’d prefer to abandon retailers to their fate, then don’t moan when they do what it takes to survive. Some will close, of course, and others will move their operations online. Those who stay open will guard themselves and their stock behind plexiglass and electronic tags. And then there’s the hi-tech solution: the fully automated and completely cashless store, in which customers have to be authenticated to even get in. 

Remember that retail facilities like this already exist. One day, when they become the norm, we’ll remember what shops used to be like. Then, we’ll ask why no one stood up for them.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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What happens when a city stakes its future on gambling? This is a question that New Yorkers should be asking with the Big Apple poised to open three casinos, two in Queens and one in the Bronx. The first casino is expected to open in the spring. It’s also a question I remember circulating around my much smaller hometown of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 2007, my senior year of high school, the city council voted by a one-vote margin to allow a Sands Casino, or what at the time was the Sands Casino (it has since been sold).

I remember driving home for Christmas a few years later from college to see the giant, garish, Fitzgeraldian Sands sign adorning a large crane on the dead factory where my grandfathers and great-grandparents had worked. I remember thinking that something had been desecrated in the name of economic growth and tax revenue. A decade and a half later, Bethlehem — one of the oldest communities in the United States — has not been significantly improved by the meager financial runoff from the casino. It has been sold to different conglomerates several times after Sands initially moved in and then discovered that it was not nearly as profitable as had been hoped.

The only meaningful improvement I could identify in the town is a nature trail that the casino funded on the opposite side of the Lehigh River as part of its initial agreement with the city. What I have noticed, conversely, is a pointlessness and tackiness to all the development that has grown up around the casino. It also stuck with me that the city has continued to cut down old trees and knock down old buildings and homes, and that year by year something of its character has been lost. This is to say nothing of the general degeneracy that the casino attracts and the prostitution which is rampant in the hotel complexes attached to the casino.

New York City is a far more complex organism than Bethlehem, but no less delicate. On the one hand, the New York casinos will likely kill much of the business of Pennsylvania’s casinos in places like Bethlehem, so that might be a good thing for Pennsylvanians. But the expansion of gambling in New York signals a full-on conversion of the city’s economy from a productive one to a purely symbolic vapor economy, in which the city itself is a shell for transactions between the rich and the desperate in equal turn.

The casinos will be pitched as an easy and productive way of redeeming fallow land, just as they were in Bethlehem. But as with the case of my hometown, the practical, economic and spiritual counterpoint remains unstated. Namely, isn’t there a better way to use fallow land, and isn’t there a better way to imagine — or not to imagine, but to incentivize economic activity? What the Faustian bargain with casinos really points to is that city planners and developers can’t or won’t incentivize gainful forms of employment and productivity.

According to the New York Times, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is skeptical but non-committal about the casinos. Given the themes of his campaign, however, he ought to be more skeptical, as casinos tend to siphon revenue from the outer-borough working class, while feeding addiction. It’s surprising that the casinos were not a larger target in his campaign, except for the fact that they’re a preferred mechanism for raising revenue among technocratic, centrist Democrats at the state level. What can’t be discounted is that casinos are popular with ordinary people before they actually experience the deleterious effects brought upon their neighborhoods.

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Matthew Gasda is a playwright, author, and columnist for UnHerd, based in New York City.

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