Yes, I too could be a self-service checkout pilferer (if I wasn’t terrified of being caught)

EVEN the most puritanical among us must surely understand the temptation. Friends and family are due to arrive at any moment. There are 1,001 last- minute preparations to make at home. But we’ve had to nip to the supermarket for half a dozen forgotten essentials, with strict orders from the spouse to get back ASAP.

The store is crammed full of shoppers, laden trolleys stretching back from the tills like traffic on the M25. So we suppress our technophobia, and join the slightly shorter queue for the self- service checkout. At last it’s our turn, and things are going surprisingly well. We’ve told the machine we’ve brought our own bag, and it seems to have understood. We scan one, two, three, four items without trouble. Blip, blip, blip, blip.

But then item number five — that vital jar of redcurrant jelly (RCJ), say, without which the company will be denied the cook’s celebrated Cumberland sauce — simply refuses to register. What’s to be done? One of the great moral questions of our age opens up before us, like a chasm beneath our feet, hellfire burning in the depths of the abyss.

Various options present themselves, all deeply unsatisfactory. One is to summon assistance from the staff, braving the impatient sighs of those behind us in the queue. But if my experience is any guide, there’s never anyone around to help.

Wrath

Another is to join one of those M25 traffic lanes at the tills. But 2018 will have come and gone by the time we get served. Then again, we could always abandon the RCJ by the scanner, and go home without it to brave the cook’s wrath.

Which brings me to the most dreadful option: why not pay for everything else then just slip the jar of RCJ unobtrusively into our shopping bag? In the highly unlikely event anyone would notice, we could always claim it was an absentminded mistake. And anyway, what supermarket giant would kick up a fuss about the theft of an item worth 80p?

A surprising number of people — I would almost say a shocking number — seem prepared to adopt this solution.

Such, anyway, is the conclusion of a survey reported yesterday, in which almost one in four of more than 2,000 questioned by vouchercodespro.co.uk admitted they’d failed to pay for an item while using a self-service checkout.

Before I go on, I should stress that most of the 23 per cent who confessed to having taken items at least once said they were reluctant thieves. More than six in ten blamed technical problems, such as scanners’ failure to recognise products — particularly fruit and vegetables.

But even though they were aware the machine hadn’t registered their purchases, it didn’t stop them from taking them anyway. And if they were really so reluctant to steal, how come 46 per cent of the guilty said they did it regularly — taking items worth an average of £23 a month — instead of learning from past difficulties and queuing for a checkout manned by a human being?

Then there’s a hardcore who admitted stealing deliberately, either because they knew they’d get away with it (40 per cent of that one-in-four) or because they didn’t have enough to pay (11 per cent).

Whatever the reasons and excuses, this mass petty pilfering at the country’s 50,000 self-service checkouts adds up to larceny on a huge scale, estimated to cost supermarkets £3.2 billion a year.

Mind you, I won’t shed many tears for the likes of Sainsbury’s and Tesco.

Though they claim they’ve introduced these infernal machines to make paying quicker and more convenient for customers, you can be pretty damn sure they save the chains more in staffing costs than they lose from shoplifting.

If the arithmetic changes (as perhaps it will, if the thefts go on escalating) I bet they’ll get rid of them, and bring back human beings before you can say ‘unexpected item in bagging area’.

Temptation

But though I understand the temptations — and believe that, up to a point, the supermarkets have themselves to blame — in my book, this doesn’t begin to excuse the pilferers.

Some may call me an insufferable prig or a coward. But like three-quarters of the population of this still largely honest country, I’d have to be at death’s door from starvation before I could bring myself to slip even an 80p jar of RCJ into my bag without paying.

It must be partly because my devoutly Christian parents brought me up to respect the Commandment ‘ thou shalt not steal’ — one of the few I’ve always obeyed. Though I’m only an intermittent believer, I have a residual fear of eternal damnation if I were ever to break it.

But if I’m to be absolutely honest, I must confess that perhaps the main reason I won’t steal, apart from my reluctance to force up prices for everyone else, is a paralysing terror of being caught. Yes, I realise self-service checkouts make it a doddle for thieves to avoid detection. I suspect, too, that even in the improbable event of a culprit being spotted by a store detective, it is vanishingly unlikely the police would do anything about it (another significant explanation of the epidemic of pilfering, since many forces stopped bothering with thefts of goods worth less than £200).

But unlikely things happen. What if I were to be caught half-inching an essential ingredient of Cumberland sauce on a day my local force chose to launch an experiment in zero-tolerance policing? I reckon I’d die of shame if my Wikipedia entry (‘Daily Mail journalist . . . Catholic . . . chain- smoker . . . father of four boys . . .’) were lengthened to include: ‘Convicted shoplifter’.

No, where buying groceries is concerned, it’s the straight and narrow for me — and when the scanner fails to recognise my purchase, I’ll forever be that goody-goody who joins the traffic jam for the humanoperated till.

Moral

But I began with a hypothetical moral conundrum. I’ll end with another that actually confronted me on Monday.

To set the scene, the vanguard of my extended family arrived on Christmas Eve, when eight of us sat down to dinner and post-prandial drinks that extended well into the small hours.

When the last guests eventually went to bed, I stayed up to clear the debris and prepare the kitchen for the 16 of us who would be at lunch the next day. It was only fair, I thought, since my poor wife — who had done all the work, as usual — would have to be up with the lark to put the massive turkey in the oven. I finally got to bed at 4am.

Three-and-a-half hours later, when it was time to put the turkey in, Mrs U was still dead to the world. I hadn’t the heart to wake her. So, heroically, I dragged myself downstairs to pre-heat the righthand section of our double oven and inserted the bird, burning my hand painfully in the process. Job done, I crawled back to bed, feeling saintly.

No sooner had I gone back upstairs than one of our sons went down for breakfast and switched on the left-hand oven to warm a pain-au-chocolat I’d bought as a Christmas morning treat.

He then switched the oven off — the wrong bloody oven! It was the one I’d put the turkey in, ten minutes earlier. A good couple of hours passed before my wife surfaced and discovered his idiotic mistake. Lunch was accordingly delayed. My heroics had come to nothing.

So my moral conundrum is this: in the circumstances described, would it have been acceptable for me to strangle my son? I rather think the answer is Yes. In the spirit of the season, however, I let him live (though I’ll never let him forget).

Ah, the joys of a family Christmas! With that, I wish every one of you a very Happy New Year.