“I can’t risk my life for a sandwich”: A day watching shoplifters at Greggs

"No pastries?" said one thief as she cleared the shelves and asked staff for further supplies.

Illustration by Carly A-F for London Centric.

Louis begins his shift at the Greggs on Brixton’s Electric Avenue at 6am every day, putting food on the shelves. Half an hour later, the shutters on the window are lifted and people come in off the street, take the stock from the shelves, and walk out without paying.

He says it is often the same shoplifters targeting his branch on a daily basis: “Sometimes they’re waiting outside for the shop to open.”

Over the course of four hours on a quiet Tuesday morning on Electric Avenue, London Centric witnessed more than a dozen shoplifters steal from this one branch of Greggs. In one instance, a woman stopped mid-theft to complain that there was not enough stock on display.

“No pastries?” she called out to the staff as she cleared the shelves.

The (almost) empty shelves at Brixton Greggs after a visit by a thief who declined to take the fruit.

The drinks shelves at Brixton’s Greggs were regularly targeted, seemingly regarded by some regulars as a free vending machine. One woman walked in and filled a large bag with bottles of Lucozade in full view of the staff, before leaving without paying. We followed as she walked down to the end of Electric Avenue and handed the bag straight over to a group of young men.

We asked one individual who returned to steal from the Brixton store on multiple occasions what he was doing with all the food he was taking.

“I’ll sell this stuff to my social worker,” he said.

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London Centric has written a lot about the damage being done by online videos that overstate the level of disorder in the capital. We’ve also covered the Met Police’s very real struggles to deal with so-called ‘petty’ crime, whether it’s mobile phone snatching or bike theft.

These two issues collide when it comes to shoplifting. Footage of thieves taking goods from the shelves of London shops regularly goes viral around the world. Little has been done to verify whether the narrative that has grown up around rampant retail theft in London is correct – or whether isolated incidents caught on camera are giving a false impression of the reality on the ground.

Viral videos of shoplifting from Greggs in London.

Branches of Greggs across the capital regularly appear in online shoplifting videos. The bakery chain has risen to the status of a British institution over the last decade, serving pastries and snacks to tens of thousands of Londoners, from office workers to students and builders. London Centric spent three days standing outside branches of Greggs in four different areas of London, with an open mind, in an effort to establish the reality behind the viral footage. We encountered a culture of systematic theft that is so established that staff have given up trying to stop it.

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