You wouldn’t steal a car,” the Noughties video piracy PSA infamously pointed out. “You wouldn’t steal a handbag. You wouldn’t steal a television.” Twenty years on, it feels like many of us would steal just about anything else though.
Call me crazy, but I’ve always subscribed to the notion that nicking stuff is, well, wrong, and that the law is something that should largely be abided by in a civilised society. But these days, I increasingly feel like an outlier – a hopelessly naive hick amid a sea of otherwise upstanding citizens who believe they’re inherently entitled to a “five-finger discount” whenever they like. All the evidence seems to suggest that we’ve entered the era of the middle-class shoplifter.
