George Bass works security for just above minimum wage and has the bruises, incident reports, and local intelligence to show for it. His new book — and this Guardian extract — is a ground-level audit of what actually works in retail loss prevention, and who actually pays for the epidemic of shoplifting now reshaping British high streets. The piece opens with a taxonomy of theft that runs from opportunistic phone snatches to organised "steaming" raids to industrial-scale cooking-oil heists. Greggs has responded by ripping out self-service cabinets in high-theft areas and installing 120-decibel "robocop" safe pods. Tesco has fitted sliding shields over products. These are defensive investments that generate no new revenue — pure cost absorption that erodes already-thin retail margins at a moment when employer NICs and business rates are climbing. Bass's preferred tool is the PTZ camera — pan/tilt/zoom units that let a single operator track a suspect and capture high-quality facial stills for evidence or local business-sharing networks. They sit in a sweet spot between cheap convex mirrors and controversial AI surveillance. But even PTZ cameras need a human behind them, and hiring a guard "feels like a tax on businesses" — one Bass acknowledges a single body cannot meaningfully cover in a 3,000-square-metre supermarket with 40,000 products and 4,000 daily customers. The most revealing passage concerns class. Bass notes the rise of "middle-class shoplifting" and, as someone earning just above minimum wage, points out the redistribution nobody talks about: shareholders and bonus-receiving executives do not absorb shrinkage. Prices do. Every stolen item becomes a markup on bread and baby formula paid by the people who can least afford it. The extraction runs in a circle — inflation pressures drive theft, theft drives prices, higher prices drive more desperation. His most effective loss-prevention technique costs nothing: local knowledge. Knowing a volatile resident's name and address, greeting him before he can escalate — "Morning, Mr Beddlington. Everything OK at Thorn Court today?" — defused a potentially violent encounter without a punch, a police call, or a report. This is the bobby-on-the-beat model privatised and pushed onto a near-minimum-wage worker. The structural picture is bleak. Retailers face a four-way squeeze: rising theft, rising employment costs, rising rates, and rising customer hostility to anti-theft measures that treat everyone as a suspect. The solutions on offer — robocops, sliding shields, AI scanning (recently paused by Sainsbury's after a false accusation) — are all friction-adding, margin-eroding, and trust-damaging. The one approach that actually works at low cost — human presence, empathy, community knowledge — is precisely the resource retailers have spent decades stripping out. Bass's account is a case study in how cost externalisation works at the street level. The security industry absorbs the risk (stabbings, spitting, content-creator harassment). Customers absorb the price increases. Low-wage workers absorb the emotional labour. Retailers absorb the capital expenditure on tech that may or may not deter. The only actors not visibly absorbing cost are the ones setting the budgets.
