Must-steal items include cosmetics, perfumes and face creams, mobile phones, computer games, DVDs, cameras and iPods. In other words, Santa is pinching early for Christmas.
The pilfering extends to everyday items. Instead of coping with the recession by trading down for dinner and serving up two-for-one pizzas out of Tesco, increasing numbers of Daily Mail readers are stealing steak. People who take The Times are taking fillets of wild salmon without paying for them. Guardianistas are heisting high-end cheeses.
This is no ordinary shoplifting. Anybody can slip a wee jar of caviar in their pocket. But to make off with an entire fillet of Scotch beef, a whole sea bream, or a very smelly Stilton concealed about your person is artful dodging of the highest order.
To be successful at this level, the shoplifter should first visit the Barbour shop in Edinburgh and liberate a waxed jacket, or better still a voluminous coat. This sine qua non countrywear is invaluable in a supermarket environment. You can stow a lot of swag, apparently, in those poachers’ pockets neatly concealed at the inside back.
Not all attempts to swipe goodies are successful. Way back in the last century, there was a case involving an old lady who had collapsed while waiting in a check-out queue. Concern for her health turned to consternation and some amusement when it transpired that her fainting fit was down to the fact that she had hidden a pack of frozen chicken breast under her woollen hat. I remember writing about this for a newspaper feature called The Honest Truth by a store detective. So it might be apocryphal.
Not all stories about shoplifting are funny. Especially if you are a celebrity caught doing a spot of pillaging. Like Lady Isobel Barnett.
This Aberdeen-born, Glasgow University-educated doctor was the doyenne of television and radio panel programmes such as What’s My Line? (Yes, we’re talking last century, again.) In later years she became a recluse and an eccentric and was rarely mentioned in the public prints. She became newsworthy again when she was caught stealing a tin of tuna and a carton of cream from the village shop. Lady Barnett was found four days later electrocuted in her bath, her death most likely suicide.
I admit to some shoplifting. Bless me father, for I stole out of Woollies in Shawlands. It was a screwdriver which I neither needed not wanted but which I had to nick to prove to my peers that I was not a wimp.
I also stole a packet of Knorr chicken noodle soup out of Galloway’s the butcher, but that was for a good cause: to feed the urchins of Househillwood at our campsite up the Gala Park.
I am, in theory, in favour of proletarian shopping. Which is when gangs of anarchists, anti-sistemas, desobedienti and other groups of radicals loot food from supermarkets to give to the poor. I have never seen such Robin Hood behaviour here. I recall a bunch of young Glaswegian proletarian shoppers whose target was mainly the HMV and Virgin record shops.
It’s not the same when you’re robbing the rich so that the poor can have an album by The Stranglers. Meanwhile, back in the supermarket, why can’t the good people of the shires (and Bearsden) not just hang about like the rest of us pushing empty trolleys in a holding pattern round Tesco at closing time, waiting for the roast chickens to be reduced to £1?
This protest by theft among the middle classes is obviously political in nature. No doubt we will be reading somewhere soon that it is all Gordon Brown’s fault.
With the increased incidence of ladies who steal, the new Waitrose in Glasgow’s Byres Road has opened its doors at an opportune time. It is an absolute delight for the discerning shoplifter. Even for those who pay, Waitrose is a boon and a blessing. It has ended years of suffering in the west end. No longer will we be denied Urbani Tartufi white truffle paste. The famine’s over. Now we can buy Barry Norman’s pickled onions off the shelf. Or upgrade to Barry Norman’s pickled shallots.
A lot of the food in Waitrose seems to be second-hand, like Barry’s pickles. There’s Charlie Bigham’s beef teriyaki and Giuseppe Cocco’s pasta. I was disappointed to see that Waitrose Glasgow has snubbed a local supplier. There are no Morton’s rolls, only Kingdom rolls from Kirkcaldy. I may switch in protest to the stone-baked baguettes. I may not since it says on the label “grand mange”, which sounds like your dog is right no well.
As ever on Byres Road there were celebrities to be spotted. Navid the shopkeeper from Still Game was discussing the relative merits of Jusrol and filo pastry with a member of staff. Sanjeev Kohli, as he is known in real life, said it was like a wee corner of Hampstead come to Glasgow. Another Glasgow comic told a Waitrose manager it was a pleasure to see the recruits from the previous Somerfield regime looking well-scrubbed and sober for a change.
For a busy supermarket, there was an almost hushed reverence as shoppers examined the cornucopia of delicacies which had been laid before them. Except for the west end lady who remonstrated gently with her teenage daughter: “I bring you to Waitrose and all you buy is Heinz baked beans?”
Some publishing news just in. My lifestyle book, Fifty Ways To Leave Your Liver, has reached the Amazon UK website top 10 sellers list, albeit in the slightly eclectic category of “humour/doctors and medicine”. Fifty Ways is trailing Maw Broon’s Remedies An’ Suchlike. But last time I looked it was ahead of Everybody Poos and Why Men Have Nipples.
OK, let’s do a deal. Everyone buys my book and I stop going on about it.
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