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.

---

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

peterfranklin_

---

This week, polling firm Wedgewood Polls was exposed for fabricating data and subsequently shut down. The company had claimed to survey competitive primary and general election races, with its results feeding into prominent polling averages, from Decision Desk HQ to Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin Substack. But the timing was suspicious: the announcement came only after an investigation by polling outlet FiftyPlusOne exposed it as fraudulent.

The scandal, breaking barely two weeks before voters go to the polls for the Midterms, follows the Median Strategies scandal in August, when another purported polling operation was revealed to be faking its data. Both Median and Wedgewood claimed their polling was merely a “social experiment” designed to show the weakness of safeguards against malicious actors in the polling industry. Many professional pollsters, like myself, rolled their eyes at this.

As questionable polling floods our politics, derailing campaigns and misleading voters, the major media outlets that cover elections have abdicated any role in adjudicating which polls are of any quality. Instead, social media and journalists covering elections prefer to highlight polls that confirm existing narratives or outcomes, regardless of how reliable they may be. This has created an environment where a poll’s newsworthiness is determined by its narrative value instead of its accuracy. These polls provide fertile ground for journalistic hot takes and social media outrage, attracting far more attention than a properly conducted survey that produces a boring or unsurprising result. Junk pollsters therefore have every incentive to keep churning out junk: there is a market for it.

What can be done about bad polls or bad actors in polling? The motives of Wedgewood and Median remain murky, but suspicion abounds that they were releasing their polls to move prediction markets and make a quick buck as those markets moved in response to their concocted findings. But their polls were only able to move markets because of the coverage they received, with outlets eager for counterintuitive or newsy findings. Meanwhile, more reputable pollsters received only passing mention.

Many media outlets have thrown their editorial polling standards out the window, with internal poll-vetting capabilities gutted as a casualty of newsroom cutbacks. Reporters are freer than ever to refer to whichever polls they please, whether or not they possess the expertise to evaluate them. But even news outlets with strong internal polling safeguards, such as the New York Times, were fooled by Wedgewood. Clearly, newsroom standards aren’t enough. If a poll is included on leading aggregation and modeling sites, it is treated as legitimate. But the polling aggregators and modelers have built their businesses on providing little value on top of polls themselves. Perhaps it is time for aggregators to take a more active role, investigating methodology and raw data proactively (as FiftyPlusOne admirably did) rather than after the fact.

Until the aggregators step in to police polling more closely, we can’t be surprised that frauds slip through. Right now, they are like logging companies harvesting a rainforest, and then wondering why they are having droughts.