Barbarians at the Tills? Post-pandemic reflections on violence and abuse against workers in the retail industry

Abstract

The UK retail sector is witnessing substantial increases in violence and abuse towards its customer-facing workers in the post-pandemic era. The costs of this violence to employee wellbeing, local community stability and economic losses to the retail industry are manifold. COVID-19 has been implicated as a central driver in these increases, as the legacy of abuse in retail settings during the pandemic lockdowns continues to affect workers across the sector. This article adopts a series of conceptual tools from critical criminology to argue that rising violence against retail staff cannot be explained by the pandemic alone. Rather, criminology must consider these trends against a background of longer-standing increases in interpersonal violence and rapidly shifting cultural currents under late-neoliberal capitalism. This article also reflects on the hardening of consumer subjectivities and declining deference to mechanisms of authority that continue to manifest under postmodern cultural conditions. These all serve as prominent features in the contextual aetiology of abuse against retail staff and render the possibility of addressing retail violence through deterrence and prevention measures problematic.

Introduction

Recent data from the British Retail Consortium (BRC) showed that violence and abuse against retail workers has almost trebled on pre-pandemic levels across the UK. Incidents including racial and sexual abuse, physical assault and threats of violence increased from a pre-covid high of over 450 per day in 2019/20, to over 1300 per day in 2022/23. The total cost of crime to the UK retail industry in 2022/23 was estimated at £3.3 billion in 2022/23, of which £1.2 billion was spent on crime prevention. Violence and abuse against retail staff is now the primary concern among workers in the industry (BRC, 2024).

Much contemporary research exploring workplace violence has been conducted outside of the UK in publications peripheral to criminology (see Marsh et al., 2022; Tiesman et al., 2023). These studies focus largely on violence in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as workers sought to navigate challenges around the enforcement of in-store social distancing, mask-wearing and other COVID-19 mandates. Additionally, UK-based research on mistreatment and bullying in the retail and service industries tends to direct attention towards the behaviour of management and co-workers (see for example Lloyd, 2018, 2019; Rayner et al., 2002), rather than conduct between workers and customers (Bishop and Hoel, 2008).

The scarcity of criminological consideration is surprising as the UK retail sector continues to witness substantial increases in violence and abuse against staff in the post-pandemic era, the consequences of which can be serious and wide-ranging. These include physical injury, stress symptoms, sleep problems, chronic fatigue, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depression (Bishop and Hoel, 2008; Bushell, 2022; Taylor, 2022).

We should also note the debilitating effect of retail-based violence and theft on the safety and stability of local communities. Convenience store operator Co-op recently cautioned that some locales risk becoming ‘no-go’ areas for retail due to rising levels of theft, violence and anti-social behaviour (BBC, 2023). These problems are compounding existing conditions in communities across the UK, many of which have already seen their socio-economic fabric eroded under half a century of neoliberal governance, deindustrialisation and increasing inequality (Cooper and Whyte, 2017; Telford and Lloyd, 2020).

Although this article is committed to the assessment of abuse against retail staff specifically, it is important to note that increasing rates of violence are not confined to this sector alone. In 2021/22, there were 44,600 assaults on emergency service workers, a 10% increase from the previous year (Home Office, 2022). The NHS (2022) also reported that 14.7% of healthcare staff experienced at least one incident of physical violence in the workplace in the last 12 months 90% of workers in the ‘gig economy’ also stated that they had been harassed whilst at work (IWGB, 2021). These statistical indicators point to an occupational landscape that is struggling with high levels of abuse and a waning deference to ethico-legal restraint on the part of customers and service-users throughout the public realm.

After summarising some of the wider trends in interpersonal violence, this article will explore the industry-specific issues around violence and abuse against customer-facing workers in the retail sector. Borrowing from recent theoretical work in critical criminology, social harm and ultra-realism (Hall and Winlow, 2015), we then advance a careful consideration of retail violence against the backdrop of shifting currents in consumer culture, political economy and postmodernity. It is through these reflections that we can form some tentative inferences around the contextual aetiology of retail-based violence together with the psychosocial factors that may be driving its increase.

Serious violent crime

Between 2015 and 2018, the homicide rate in England and Wales increased by 39% (Ellis, 2022) with murder involving knives or sharp instruments reaching its highest level on record in 2018 (ONS, 2019b). Knife possession also increased between 2013 and 2019, and again in 2021/22 after a decline during the lockdown periods (Ministry of Justice, 2023). Despite disproportionate stop and search procedures, particularly in relation to over-searching of those from black and Asian backgrounds (see Vomfell and Stewart, 2021), such increases present cause for concern about a seeming readiness to carry lethal weapons in public places. This is a serious issue for retail workers as the Association of Convenience Stores reported that 44% of incidents involving weapons in their stores included the use of a knife (ACS, 2023).

Some increases in violent crime have been attributed to gang activities and a manifestation of toxic masculinity or gender-based violence (see Pitts, 2020; also see Ellis, 2019). However, Vulliamy et al. (2022) pointed out that children and young men from deprived inner-city areas presented as a subgroup most at risk. Haylock et al. (2020) also refer to poor mental health outcomes and social inequality as risk factors associated with knife crime. Grey et al. (2023) allude to the complex relationship between adverse childhood experiences, trauma and serious youth violence. This expanding composite of factors is therefore indicative of a problem that is multifarious and not easily explained by gender alone.

Similarly, the tendency to resort to violence against retail workers cannot be condensed to a unipolar narrative around aggressive masculinity or the acting-out of gendered behavioural traits. Nor can these trends be explained solely by an enduring legacy of lockdown frustration (see Duffy et al., 2020). As with Ellis’s (2019, 2022) observations around the contextual aetiology of serious violence more generally, we should consider the current rates of workplace violence in retail against the wider backdrop of pre-pandemic austerity, political economy, social inequality and the mutability of harmful subjectivities in contemporary consumer culture.

Spheres of violence in the COVID-19 era

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a unique set of social circumstances that undoubtedly affected patterns of violence in the UK (Ellis, 2022). During the lockdown periods, freedom of movement was restricted to the home as well as some retail spaces which were allowed to remain open for essential goods. Consequently, interpersonal violence became channelled into these two spheres as the lockdowns reduced the likelihood of violence in other spaces. Between April and June 2020, there was a reported increase of 8.1% in intimate partner abuse and an 11.4% increase in violence from other family members (Havard, 2021). In response, criminological literature directed its gaze towards a ‘shadow pandemic’ of violence within the domestic sphere during the COVID lockdowns (see for example Piquero et al., 2021; Walklate, 2021). This increase in attention to domestic violence surfaced almost as immediately as lockdown measures were imposed.

However, it has become clear from the body of domestic and family research during the COVID-19 era that these problems did not emanate directly from the pandemic. Rather, the lockdowns should be seen as an exacerbating feature of a much longer-standing invisibility of violence in domestic settings. The pandemic also further diminished the capacity for victims to seek help from critical service-providers, many of which had already seen a sustained decline in funding since the global financial crisis of 2008 (Pfitzner et al., 2023). Though it is necessary to acknowledge the importance of violence under COVID-19, it does not present a complete picture surrounding increasing rates of violence in the home (Ellis, 2022). Legacies of austerity, the cost-of-living crisis and pre-existing inequalities that widened during the pandemic should also be considered. This is much the same for customer violence and abuse against staff in the retail industry.

Routine face-to-face interaction with large numbers of people openly exposes workers to hardening public attitudes around service-provision, customer entitlement and the perceived superiority of the sovereign consumer (see Yagil, 2008). Face-to-face operations in retail and hospitality during the pandemic brought the pressure of these anxious exchanges into sharp relief. Workers faced an unprecedented range of additional duties during COVID-19, including the monitoring and enforcement of social distancing and mask-wearing, as well as contending with the outcomes of disrupted supply chains and diminishing stock of household items (Booyens et al., 2022). Such responsibilities often put retail workers at further risk as the BRC (2022) indicated that violence and abuse almost trebled from 455 per day in 2019/20 to 1301 per day during the pandemic period of 2020/21.

The trajectory of inequalities in the labour market also intensified during COVID-19 as low-income workers were disproportionately affected by shutdowns in their sectors and many were unable to work from home (Arrieta, 2022). Again, this has compounded pre-existing pressures experienced by frontline employees in the retail and service industries, where long-standing working arrangements have been consistently insecure, temporary and low-paid (see Lloyd, 2018). Walklate and Fitz-Gibbon (2023) point to the need to build on approaches that explore the social conditions that foster acts of violence, together with the societal structures that enable and sustain them. This article intends to follow a similar line in probing some of the harmful consumer subjectivities under late-neoliberal capitalism where acts of violence can erupt in increasingly complex ways.

Violence on the shopfloor

In June 2023, Josh McDonald was jailed for 6 years after assaulting a supermarket worker in 2021, the assault left the victim unconscious. The attack was part of an Internet ‘prank’ where a group dressed as fictional characters, entered Asda supermarket causing disorder whilst streaming the event live on social media (King, 2023). Although this case may seem extreme in its violence and arbitrary in its execution - the group were not out to steal, only to create a spectacle for online consumption - many shop workers would not express surprise at such events. Violence and abuse against retail staff has suffered from chronic underreporting due to lack of time, a laboured police reporting procedure, fear of reprisals and a futility about the effectiveness of reporting such incidents (Taylor, 2022; see also Home Office, 2019).

Taylor (2019, 2022) points to challenging and/or apprehending shoplifters as the primary trigger for violence and abuse in the retail sector. She also alludes to four other triggers in addition to shoplifting: enforcing legislation relating to the sale of age-restricted goods, hate motivated incidents, robberies, and enforcing COVID-19 restrictions during the pandemic (Taylor, 2019, 2022). The Union of Shop Distributive and Allied Workers (2022) survey reported that triggers for violence and abuse were becoming more complex and multifarious. Queuing, lack of staff, product returns policies and low stock were implicated as triggers in the first post-pandemic survey. Overall, however, these results present a familiar picture, with rates of reported violence in the 2023 survey eclipsing any of the USDAW’s pre-pandemic surveys, dating back to 2007. Although triggers for violence and abuse provide us with some explanation around the various contexts in which they might emerge, they tend to focus on the symptomatic outcomes of deeper processes and reveal little about the underlying structures that inform them. Neither do they fully explain why these types of violence have become more ubiquitous, increasingly underreported and largely accepted in the early 21st century.

Taylor (2019, 2022) has laid some important foundations in her explanation of the drivers and social determinants of violent crime that affect shop workers’ experiences of abuse. She focuses on the challenges of dealing with those under the influence of illicit drugs and the substantial decline in funding for drug and alcohol treatment services. Taylor (2019: 37) also points to the ‘loss of 21,000 police officers (in addition to 18,000 police staff and 6800 police community support officers)’ since 2010 and its impact on community safety. The lack of resources has meant that police will not always attend incidents of retail crime, even where violence is threatened or used. The BRC (2023) note that there is a perception among both retail workers and some recidivist offenders that police will not prosecute (or even attend) incidents where stolen goods amount to less than £200 in value. Unsurprisingly, the problems surrounding police intervention have further widened the chasm between police-recorded crime and the ‘true’ crime rate within the retail trade (Taylor, 2019).

Findings from Taylor’s (2019; 2022) research point to a spiral of social and economic decline, as those who face addiction and homelessness turn to increasingly desperate methods to subsist. Some of these outcomes have clearly been driven by the entrenched austerity period of the 2010s and the ongoing withdrawal of all but the skeletal remains of a welfare support system in the UK. However, the idea that the widespread violence directed at retail workers can be attributed largely to those struggling with drug addiction or acute socioeconomic peril is problematic. More empirical work is needed to establish the geographical distribution of retail violence, but it is evident from the extent of the problem that it is not something limited to the most deprived areas of the UK. The BRC (2023) reported increases across a wide spectrum of inner cities and town centres, shopping centres, retail parks and out-of-town malls in 2021/22. It is therefore important to consider the issue in its wider structural context, including the historico-political and cultural changes that shape violence over time and space.

Pseudo-pacification

As we have seen, academic discussion has so far failed to fully account for the increases in violence against retail workers and tends to overlook several underlying features in the shifting landscape under late-neoliberal economic relations. In bringing a more nuanced perspective to the debate, it is necessary to venture back and take stock of some of the psychosocial trajectories that shaped the historical decline in violence throughout the Modern era and to explain why this decline may be undergoing a ‘de-civilising reversal’ (Ellis, 2019) in the early 21st century.

Scholarly consensus around the long-term decline of violence has focused on Norbert Elias’ (2000) ‘civilizing process’. This complex socio-psychological process emerged in Early Modern Europe and emphasised advancing forms of self-restraint, together with a state monopoly on violence and a growing interdependency between individuals. These transitioning behavioural controls were seen as instrumental in quelling the brutal forms of interpersonal conflict that had dominated life throughout the late Middle Ages (Spierenburg, 2008). Systematic quantitative analyses of long-term European homicide patterns tend to support the idea of a civilising process, with murder rates decreasing from around 20 per 100,000 of the population in the Early Modern era to around 1 per 100,000 in the mid-twentieth century (Eisner, 2001; Spierenburg, 2008).

Although the civilising process may have been influential in shaping the necessary conditions for a decline in murder and serious violence, it did not pacify the population along a progressive linear trajectory that remains intact today as some scholars have claimed (see for example Pinker, 2012); nor was it a purposive ethical project in and of itself. Rather, the civilising process worked to sublimate the tendency towards overt brutality into:

‘a multitude of criminalised and legalized forms of exploitation, deception and appropriation, which ran alongside and in tension with…a sort of insulating sleeve of ethico-legal restraints, like the thick but flexible insulation around an electrical wire carrying a powerful current’ (Hall, 2012: 32).

Hall (2012) refers to these attempts to gradually pacify the population in servicing the advancement of a free market economy as the pseudo-pacification process (see also Hall, 2000; Hall and Winlow, 2003). This process depended on harnessing our propensity for barbarism and directing its potent energy into a sublimated spectrum of behaviours that although not overtly violent, were characterised by aggressive interpersonal rivalry, exploitation and securing competitive advantage over others.

The fragile equilibrium that emerged from these market-driven transitions operated with some degree of success into the mid-20^th century as the social democratic commitment to full employment and welfare security paved the way for a period of relative social stability following the end of World War ll (Harvey, 2005). Employment was secure and remained under 3.1% in the UK between 1945 and 1971 (Denham and McDonald, 1996). A robust framework of union representation also emerged during this period, affording the working class a measure of protection from the excesses of capitalism. The post-WWII era was not in any sense an emancipatory utopia, but it did work to narrow the chasm of inequality between rich and poor as the implicit rules of the social democratic consensus ensured that labour was reasonably well-renumerated when productivity and profits grew (Lloyd, 2018). However, the delicate nature of pseudo-pacified social relations meant that under rapidly shifting political-economic arrangements, problems began to emerge.

Following the global economic crises of the 1970s, the Keynesian model of economic governance that had tempered the omnipotence of market forces in previous decades was rejected and rapidly replaced with an unremitting commitment to neoliberalism. This ideological turn played a central role in reversing the flow of capital as production was rapidly replaced by consumption, ushering in an exponential rise of insecure low-paid work in a newly established service-economy (Harvey, 2005; Telford and Lloyd, 2020). The shift to neoliberalism and deindustrialisation seriously disrupted the stability and collective identity of many communities in the former industrial heartlands across the West, halting the progress made by the working-classes during the social democratic era (Winlow and Hall, 2013).

Insecure workers in the lowest echelons of the occupational hierarchy are becoming exposed to labour conditions that resemble serfdom (Neckel, 2020). These conditions are also marked by a sense of ‘status fatalism’ or hopelessness that workers attach to their precarious position under late-neoliberal working arrangements. The oft-repeated admission from retail workers that abuse is ‘just part of the job’ (BRC, 2023: 22) captures the essence of this fatalism and its universality within the sector. In their article ‘Barbarians at the Gates’, Hall and Winlow (2016) suggest that we have now entered a ‘twilight’ stage in the pseudo-pacification process, where the cultural values of competitive individualism that lie at the core of the free-market ethos dominate every aspect of life across the West. These potentially harmful subjectivities are not limited to business and economic transactions but extend into our personal relationships, leisure time, and consumer lifestyles (Hall, 2019; Smith and Raymen, 2016, 2019).

To employ Hall’s (2012) analogy, the insulation sheath that served to contain the psychosocial currents of our violent past has begun to deteriorate. Spontaneous acts of violence and abuse directed towards workers in the public sphere are symptomatic of an ‘arching’ or flashpoint which can occur when this insulating sheath becomes worn away, exposing them – albeit fleetingly - to a form of narcissistic barbarism that is devoid of ethical restraint or moral consideration for the other.

Inconsequential workers

The exponential rise of insecure service work across Western countries in the 21st century has presented a host of existential challenges for those who occupy the lower rungs of the labour market. The Low Pay Commission reported that 45% of all jobs paying at or below the minimum wage are in retail, hospitality and cleaning and maintenance services (House of Commons Library, 2023). Eight in 10 retail workers stated that their mental wellbeing had deteriorated due to working conditions, including the impact of customer aggression and abuse (Retail Trust, 2023). Retail workers’ position in the labour hierarchy not only creates a sense of market-related status fatalism but can also lead to problems in the way they are perceived by others.

While corporate elites and tech innovators are often the subject of admiration for their business acumen and wealth accumulation strategies, those in the lowest strata of the occupational hierarchy offer no such appeal. They face exploitative working practices, minimal pay, limited union representation and often unsociably long shifts that allow for little rest or family time (Bushell, 2022; Lloyd, 2018, 2019). However, the brutally competitive ethos espoused by late-neoliberalism does not view these workers as trapped in a cycle of routine exploitation from which there is little chance of escape. Instead, the postmodern consumer’s perception of these workers is often one of an inconsequential other. Anathema to the corner-cutting entrepreneurs who award themselves the ‘special liberty’ (see Hall, 2012) to dispense with rules and ethical boundaries in their quest for wealth and prestige, retail workers are seen as servile to the drudgery of conventional low-paid labour.

The inconsequential othering of retail workers can be seen in the Shopkind communications campaign which aims to raise awareness about abuse towards staff and promotes positive customer behaviour. This UK Home Office-funded initiative offers a range of downloadable posters on their website with messages such as ‘Please remember, whoever you are talking to behind the till is a real person with real feelings, please ShopKind’ and ‘We are normal people that have a job to do’. Retailers are directed to display these reminders in prominent positions across the shopfloor (National Business Crime Centre, 2023). The language adopted in these posters presents a default perception of retail staff as inherently abnormal or less than human in the consumer imagination. Customers are seen as needing a gentle prompt that staff share the same emotional sensibilities as other sentient beings and are therefore susceptible to upset if abused or attacked. The resort to binaries of normal-abnormal and person-nonperson elicits notions of symbolic violence (Žižek, 2008) and a tacit acknowledgement in the industry that the civility of customer-worker relations has become virtually extinct. As we shall explore later, this latter point is indicative of a harmful environment where staff face debasement from customers and from the retail industry itself.

It is important to note that those who cast judgments on retail staff as inferior or inconsequential may be in the very same insecure socio-economic position as the workers they seek to demean. Nevertheless, postmodernity has inculcated an illusion of meritocracy into the consumer subject whereby a treasure trove of opportunities could lie just around the corner, ready for the taking. Conversely, retail work is often seen as demeaning – something that other ‘skivvies’ endure (Lloyd, 2012) - as the prospect of becoming a high-flying entrepreneur or social media ‘influencer in waiting’ assures the consumer subject that the trappings of wealth are never far out of reach.

Unfulfilled consumers

Struggling to keep pace with the shifting challenges that typify the instability of the neoliberal economic model, high street commerce has endured substantial decline over the past 40 years. By 2013, the impact of the global economic crisis had cost 198,000 jobs in the retail sector and almost 1.5bn in lost rent (CBRE, 2013) as many retailers collapsed under the dominance of supermarket chains, global brands and a rapidly building transition to e-commerce. The recent demise of retailer Wilkos’ presence on the UK high street demonstrated that even the larger brands are not immune from the vagaries of the marketplace. Wilkos closed all 400 stores with the loss of over 12,000 jobs in August 2023 (Sweney, 2023). Many of the social anchor points that attracted footfall to town centres - such as churches, libraries and community centres - have also diminished considerably (Dobson, 2015).

In contrast, the lure of online retail began to build in the 2010s and accelerated dramatically during COVID-19, remaining high across many Internet sales sectors since then (ONS, 2022). The customer’s pursuit of choice and convenience have contributed to the expansion of online retail markets resulting in an exodus away from high-street retail (Turner and Gardner, 2014). The streamlined next-day doorstep delivery models and no quibbles return policies of Amazon and other global online retailers have now firmly established themselves in the mindset of the contemporary consumer. The prospect of queuing to engage in face-to-face encounters with retail workers or the limited reliability of an automated check-out are now seen as regressive alternatives for which there is relatively little tolerance.

Winlow and Hall (2013) note that contemporary relations between retail staff and consumers are now evoking a consumerised strain of Rousseau’s amour propre, a hostile and superior consideration for the self over the other. An inflamed amour propre which dominates in the current social conditions can leave us frustrated with an ever-greater desire for positive evaluation and ‘for social goods that have no real worth and are detached from the true sources of pleasure’ (Kolodny, 2010: 172). The prevalence of these destructive behavioural tendencies has clear implications for the manifestation of abuse towards workers in customer-facing markets. Affronts that may seem trivial such as a retail worker’s refusal to process a return, or the prospect of having to wait several days for product replenishment, stand as obstacles to the perceived satiation of desire for the consumer object and its symbolic worth. This is an illusory predicament once we begin to consider that no matter how many designer items or luxury goods we amass, our relationship with desire means that as consumers, we continue to remain unsatisfied.

The consumer subject is perpetually engaged in a pursuit of their target of fulfilment – Lacan’s objet petit a, or lost object. The ‘lost object’ never really existed yet it acquires an illusion of accessibility as a physical commodity so the individual is motivated to seek it out over-and-over in an expectation that eventually their quest will be fruitful (McGowan, 2016). This zero-sum game provides the lifeblood for consumer capitalism to flourish but it can also emerge as a source of deep frustration for the unfulfilled subject. The destructive cultural injunctions of amour propre and the perpetual sense of loss felt by the unfulfilled consumer create something of a perfect storm in propagating the psychosocial seeds for much of the aggression faced by public-facing workers across the retail and service industries.

Further problems lie down the road if we move towards a consideration of resistance on the part of the worker. The sense of superiority that dwells within amour propre also bristles with insecurity and the vices of pride (Kolodny, 2010). The prospect of facing a verbal challenge over proof of age or becoming involved in an escalating dispute over pricing can elicit feelings of humiliation when the complainant’s self-identity is threatened, particularly in the presence of other customers (Yagil, 2008; also see Taylor, 2019). Beck (2000) denotes a cognitive element to this scenario where our primal thinking processes become activated when we perceive our interests as threatened. Primal thinking is impulsive and does not carry the pro-social benefits of depth self-reflection, so some features of the scenario become exaggerated or distorted while others are quickly attenuated or dismissed. Primal thinking can be socially disruptive and within the context of a dispute on the shop floor, it is easy to view such errors in cognition as vital precursors to an abusive confrontation.

As we have seen, the contextual aetiology of violence in retail spaces is complex and demands a multifactorial approach. These considerations must extend well beyond unipolar influences such as COVID-19 or the current cost-of-living crisis. As we now go on to assess some of the crime prevention and deterrence strategies employed in the retail industry, it becomes clear that such approaches are equally complex and problematic in their ability to mitigate violence against workers in the sector.

Tackling retail violence

Recent efforts to curb violence towards customer-facing workers have involved a range of interventions. Traditionally the preserve of law enforcement, bodycams are becoming increasingly common as a means of deterrence in the retail industry. The UK’s largest supermarket, Tesco provided bodycams to security and shopfloor staff in all their stores and petrol filling stations from 2020 onwards. They allude to these cameras as a way of de-escalating conflict, stating that the ‘threat’ of switching them on is often enough to scale down the potential for violent confrontation (Bayford, 2022). Other major retailers including Co-op and the UK bakery firm Greggs have either adopted bodycams or are currently trialling them in stores to assess their effectiveness (Nott, 2020). Technology corporations have sought to capitalise on this trend with the global market in bodycam sales predicted to reach US$700m by 2024 (Economist, 2022). Companies such as Halo are targeting the lease and sale of their bodycam technologies specifically to the retail industry to help ensure a ‘fun and safe environment for staff, consumers, and communities’ (Halo, 2022). However, the economic outlay of these cameras - which can cost upwards of £500 per unit - means that only the larger retail enterprises will be able to adopt them, leaving some independent stores excluded from the market.

Another recent intervention aimed at reducing violence against employees in the retail and service industries is embedded in Section 156 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act (2022). This statutory instrument introduced a new aggravating factor for assaults against those who provide a public service, perform a public duty, or provide services, goods or facilities to the public (Home Office, 2022). It intended to ‘send a very strong signal’ that assaults against those who serve the public are unacceptable. Nevertheless, the UK government have no formal plans to monitor the deterrent effects of this provision as they do not collect data on the use of aggravating factors and intend to rely instead on retail surveys to ‘help to build a wider picture of all incidents that have taken place and their outcomes’ (Home Office, 2022: 4).

In a shift towards adopting more radical situational crime prevention measures, convenience retailers such as Co-op and Budgens are also resorting to fog cannons. These are deployed to disorientate shoplifters or customers who become violent (Co-op, 2020). Fog cannon supplier FogBandit reference their product’s ability to deliver up to 30 cubic metres of dense fog per second to maximise vision impairment (Bandit UK, 2023). Some of these fog products also contain SmartWater, a forensic spray which is invisible to the naked eye but glows under UV blacklight and ‘tags’ offenders to the location where it was discharged (DeterTech, 2023). Despite assurances that fog cannons and SmartWater droplets are physically harmless, this approach warrants critical consideration for two reasons. Firstly, it has the potential to result in acute psychological discomfort for the shop worker, especially as it is noted that fog cannons are most effective around the staff kiosk (Co-op, 2019). Secondly, SmartWater will not only tag the offender but also retail employees and anyone else in the vicinity at the time of discharge. SmartWater is guaranteed to last at least 5 years and is almost impossible to remove; it can withstand water, fire, humidity and sunlight (DeterTech, 2023).

Capitalist economies contain harm – in both senses of the word (Raymen, 2023; see also Dupuy, 2014) and as we have seen, liberal capitalism harbours various forms of harm in the pursuit of its central profit motive. However, ‘through a process of self-exteriorisation, this original violence also ‘contains’ violence in the other sense of keeping real physical conflict at bay’ (Raymen, 2023: 50). The retail industry deploys technologies such as fog cannons and SmartWater to contain economic losses through theft (and presumably violence against staff), as they seek to retain healthy profit margins for shareholders. As we have seen however, these supposed deterrents also contain harms that affect the worker. Such strategies also demonstrate liberal capitalism’s embedded assumption of harmlessness in the way that ‘lesser’ harms become justified, relativised or ignored in serving a greater good for capital accumulation and revenue protection (Raymen, 2023). Ultimately, it is retail staff who must bear the weight of these assumptions of harmlessness as they become collateral damage in capitalism’s solutions to the issues that threaten its profit margins.

Postmodernity and the declining deference to authority

Whether they be situational or statutory, the effectiveness of crime prevention strategies in the retail industry must be considered within a wider cultural context. Here, it is apt to reflect on the extent to which we are witnessing a declining deference to the role of authority, together with the formal and informal mechanisms that mediate it.

Jean-François Lyotard (1984) identifies a defining feature of postmodern discourse in its ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’. In the latter decades of the 20th century, Western populations began to lose confidence and faith in the grand narratives that had provided some sense of order and stability throughout modernity. Such structures were increasingly seen as overly restrictive and stultified our ability to tap into the full diversity of human experience. Suspicion and deep cynicism began to shroud the legitimacy of overarching institutions and their role in regulating our decisions, values and behaviours. As Winlow and Hall (2023) point out, postmodernism deconstructed every facet of social life into a colossus of fragmented abstractions, many of which had little bearing on the material interests of the population at large. Far from seeking to adopt a balance between individual liberty and more collective forms of social organisation, postmodern ethics was concerned with inspiring the calculating individual to plot their own course, unimpeded by the influence of stuffy institutions and mechanisms of authority that would surely drag the population towards totalitarianism if left intact.

One narrative that suffered a sustained assault under postmodernity was the idea of morality. Seen as a baseless and myth-ridden concept in the postmodern imagination, morality ‘forced people to live by the rules’ even though these rules were seen as ‘reductive, immobile, blind to context and created without popular consent’ (Winlow and Hall, 2023: 239). Even the most rudimentary collective consensus around fairness, civility, ethical responsibility and a unified conception of the ‘Good life’ (Raymen, 2023; see also MacIntyre, 2011) was to be avoided at all costs.

In his discussion of police legitimacy under postmodernity, Reiner (1992) sees the postmodern dispensation with morality as a realisation of the relativism that was inherent in Enlightenment thinking from the start. However, in considering the declining deference to overarching systems of authority, postmodernity did not so much shatter a 400-year-old illusion as to stimulate a deterioration in symbolic efficiency. Forming an inseparable element in Jacques Lacan’s Borromean knot, the symbolic order is a shared ideological illusion that the subject must solicit to develop a functional understanding of the social world. Together with its cultural network of codes and institutions (known as the ‘Big Other’), the symbolic order provides us with a means of structuring reality. However, Raymen (2023) draws our attention to liberal postmodernity’s corrosive deconstruction of the symbolic order through its dispensation of collective identities and the contention that all forms of power act as systems of domination over our individual freedoms.

A pro-social path to human flourishing would require the solicitation of a symbolic order that is organised around the pursuit of internal goods or ‘goods which are good for their own sake,’ rather than external goods such as power, wealth and individual prestige (Raymen, 2023: 228). Instead, liberal postmodernity’s cultural taxonomy favours self-interest and total individual sovereignty, qualities that sit comfortably within consumer capitalism’s archetypal ideals (see also Lloyd, 2018). As it seeks out ways of deconstructing every facet of human experience, postmodern culture leaves nothing in its wake. The result is an endless plurality of localised narratives and a multiplicity of language games (see Wittgenstein, 1986). Without a cogent means of structuring reality, we are either drawn into a confrontation with the terror of the Lacanian ‘Real’ or we regress into the imaginary realm, where there is no distinction between the plurality of our individual feelings and reality. The decline in symbolic efficiency that postmodernity has ushered in has profound implications for our tendency to relativise harm, as well as our relationship with mechanisms of authority, regulation and control.

The retail industry has repeatedly called for more investment and better allocation of resources for crime prevention. They lobby for the extended use of CCTV, body cameras, facial recognition, stronger legislation, tougher sentencing and better use of strategies such as crime prevention through environmental design (ACS, 2023; BRC, 2023). However, if contemporary norms and values continue to display an advancing decline in symbolic efficiency and a waning recognition of all forms of authority, it may not matter how much the industry invests or how innovative their deterrent tools become.

It is clear from the narratives of persistent recidivist shoplifters that they do not fear the police and see the threat of imprisonment as an occupational hazard rather than any kind of effective deterrent (Taylor, 2019). Research in some of England’s post-industrial micro-communities has highlighted that attitudes of young people towards criminality demonstrated a full commitment to mainstream cultural-economic values which they act out in ‘notably visceral and occasionally violent ways’ (Hall and Winlow, 2016: 279). However, the prevalence of violence against workers across the public realm challenges the contention that it is a deference to authority which separates the ‘economically included’ from their excluded counterparts. Postmodernity has provoked a transcendence of authoritative deference, where it is not only those who are excised from global capitalism’s legitimate channels who resort to acts of violence and abuse to satisfy their frustrations and desires. From the themes visited throughout this article, the problem appears to be far more widely culturally embedded and likely to continue to increase in the coming years. This presents a serious and urgent dilemma for the retail industry, local community stability, policing strategies and society at large.

Conclusion

As the problem of interpersonal violence continues to increase in the post-pandemic era, Ellis (2022) has argued that criminology must direct its theoretical focus toward the contextual aetiologies that underpin conflict and harm. This article has examined the rising rates of retail violence and abuse in the UK and suggested that although the tectonic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic may be partly implicated in driving these increases, it cannot furnish us with a complete explanation. We argue that a more holistic analysis must include an assessment of the role of pseudo-pacification, shifting currents in consumer culture, and the socially corrosive effects of postmodernity. Concurring with Hall and Winlow’s (2016) analysis, we infer that under neo-liberal labour relations across Western societies, pseudo-pacified social relations are beginning to fray. The symptoms of this transition are clear to see in a retail industry that is struggling under the weight of interpersonal violence and abuse.

This article has advanced an argument that the widespread investment in crime prevention and deterrence in the retail industry may offer up little in the way of mitigating violence and abuse on the shopfloor. The hardened subjectivities and declining deference to mechanisms of authority under postmodernity have left the anxious consumer lacking in moral consideration for the inconsequential other and increasingly devoid of ethico-legal restraint.

Although it is beyond the scope of this article to provide detailed recommendations for countering violence in the retail industry, it has become clear that current technological and situational crime prevention measures alone cannot provide a sustained solution to the problem. We need to do more to understand the psychology of violence against workers specifically, in both its instrumental and expressive contexts. We must also work to illuminate the mechanisms of perceived injustice and righteous violence that the abusive customer is moved to externalise and act out on vulnerable workers. Finally, as a longer-standing ethical project, we must seek out ways of redirecting our potent libidinal energies away from liberal capitalism’s fetishistic obsession with individual consumer sovereignty and aggressive competition, into a more pro-social and collective pursuit of human flourishing.