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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Tim Cook was an excellent CEO from the only point of view that truly matters: money. Apple is 10 times bigger than it was 15 years ago, remains one of the three highest-valued companies on the planet, and has expanded respectably into services while doing nothing to screw up its foundational positions in hardware.

But there is one crucial ingredient that has been lost under Cook’s leadership: vision. Gone are the days of the iPhone, the iPod, and even the old MacBook — all of which were culturally significant in their own right. Under Cook, these innovative products have been replaced by the Apple Watch, AirPods, and various software services. None of these were conceptually new, but the achievement was operational: tighter integration, higher margins, and a more hermetic ecosystem.

It took EU regulation to force Apple to give up its proprietary Lightning cable and shift to the USB cables everyone else uses. That episode serves as a neat metaphor: preserve control, preserve margins, and preserve the aura of specialness until an external force compels change. Unless they’re hardcore Linux junkies, the most anti-capitalist artists in the world still end up on Apple hardware. This was Jobs’s vision all the way, and Cook hewed to it skilfully.

Apple’s AI development, on the other hand, remains hazy to the outside world, with its 10-year attempt to develop a self-driving car finally abandoned in 2024. Ironically, it was Cook’s most ambitious bid to leave some kind of Jobs-like footprint, hoping to create a completely autonomous car that didn’t need any driver intervention. This was a daunting task that Jobs himself likely would have rejected as infeasible.

Jobs’s coup with the iPhone was taking several pieces of technology and infrastructure that already existed — mobile networks, ARM CPUs, and supply chains — and yoking them together to dump us into an always-online world. The risk remained, but it was trivial compared with the Apple Car, which, true to Apple’s austere design ethos, was reportedly conceived without human driving controls at all, effectively betting on a self-driving infrastructure that didn’t yet exist even in prototype form. Elon Musk may be planning for a Mars colony, but he hasn’t made it a product division of Tesla.

Still, when a company has a $3 trillion market cap, it’s easy enough to absorb a failed moonshot project like an autonomous car. It could be argued that outside of AI, the general lack of mind-blowing tech from the tech titans over the last fifteen years has been a result of that monumental success, where these companies that are big enough to absorb any threats to dominance are also too big to get reality checks put on their dreams before it’s too late. We are still waiting for the next generation of usurpers, as Microsoft usurped IBM and Google and Amazon et al. usurped Microsoft.

Nonetheless, Cook did not screw things up like Steve Ballmer, who dragged Microsoft down with Windows Vista and Windows 8 before Satya Nadella somehow righted the ship, and that is enough to cement a respectable place in corporate history for him. He didn’t often try to be his predecessor (and when he did, as with Apple Car, he didn’t make a big noise about it). Nor did he indulge the kind of personal eccentricities that sometimes surrounded Steve Jobs, including his well-documented openness to alternative approaches to medicine during his illness.

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David Auerbach is an American author and former Microsoft and Google software engineer.

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