Welcome to the low-trust economy

This article was first published in The Critic.

If you walk into the newly refurbished Greggs on West Croydon high street, you will find behind the counter, the familiar pastries and cakes, the steak bake, iced fingers, and — my favourite — the sausage roll. What you will not find is the right to pick any of them up at will. Shelves have been emptied, fridges rolled back, with sandwiches and drinks delivered by staff behind the till. All that is left for a shoplifter to nick are stirrers, napkins, and sugar sachets.

This looks and feels more like a citadel than a shop.

For anyone who has been to Argos, this may not feel like a big deal — Greggs is simply adopting Argos’ business model for the consumer cyclical sector. Or, indeed, reverting to the counter-service norm of almost all British stores prior to the post-WW2 rise of the supermarket. But the motive here reveals a growing pattern we see on our high streets. Ann Summers, H&M, and Go Outdoors are among a growing number of stores that fit body cameras on their security staff. M&S and Co-op shroud their beef joints in security tags. Superdrug locks up toothpaste. Several supermarkets now tag everyday essentials and festive foods, while testing AI-monitoring pods in pilot schemes. Retailers are forced to do what they should not have to do: redesign their shop floors under the assumption that their customers are likely thieves. 

Paranoia? Alas, no. The numbers reveal why retailers have to do this. The latest data on shoplifting incidents show that there were 530,000 reported cases in England and Wales — a 20 percent increase from the year before and the highest since records began in 2003. The total cost of retail crime as reported by the British Retail Consortium was £4.2 billion, with £2.2 billion based on replenishing stolen items and £1.8 billion spent on monitoring and preventative measures such as cameras, bodycams, tags, and security personnel. For the honest household, this adds £133 to their bill. Every day, there are 2000 reported events of violence and abuse against shop assistants. A shoplifter — nicknamed “Hamster” by staff at the West Croydon Greggs — was filmed consistently stealing goods from the store for 38 days between December 2025 and February 2026, worth £2,000. He avoided kail.

One may say: treat these events all as crime and demand longer sentences, more bobbies on the beat, scrap the £200 threshold under Section 22A of the Magistrates Courts Act which treats theft below this amount as a clerical inconvenience. Yes, true — this is all sound and necessary. But it does not address the root cause which retailers are observing. That is, Britain is slowly becoming a low-trust society, and commercial activity is bearing the brunt of it.

It is a shame that businesses are forced to regress in this manner. In the post war years, British retailers began to encourage a self-service customer experience, abandoning the locked-counter model. It presumed a contract between customer and retailer: customer picks up a loaf of bread, pays at the till, then leaves with the loaf of bread. This was built on a moral foundation where people honoured their contracts such that the cost of police surveillance was greater than the savings of trust. It created a more pleasant shopping experience, saving time on the till and delivering cheaper goods to customers. It also presumed that society could be left to its own devices.

Sadly, the strength of presumption has been slowly dissipating. In December, Gallup recorded a 12-point decline in judicial confidence — the steepest drop since records began in 2007. Approximately 27 percent of Brits report a meaningful trust in the Government – well below the OECD average of 39 percent. Additionally, only 12 percent of Britons believe that politicians act in the best interest of the people. What we see here is growing apathy, a sense of people having no expectation of their government to function on their behalf. If the state is derelict in its responsibility to maintain law and order, it then becomes incumbent on individuals and businesses to do what they can to protect themselves. Companies like Greggs have no option but to be in the police security business, hiring a bouncer for each bakery.

Starting — or expanding — a business in 2026 means considering not only fixed costs such as payroll and rent, but also the drain caused by bureaucratic apathy whilst contending with growing security concerns. Profits that could have been used towards opening a new branch may be redirected to upgrading security systems, buying plexiglass and installing Electronic Artificial Surveillance (EAS) gates. As violence and abuse of staff become more prevalent, time spent on incident reports eats into valuable time that could have been spent on delivering a quality product or service to customers. To top this all off, having abdicated its responsibility to consider the welfare of businesses, the state proceeds to tax the resulting compensation businesses get after all their effort. 

These retail problems then collide with other, broader strains on the economy which cost businesses. The recently passed Employment Rights Act has made paternity leave and sick pay day one rights from 6 April this year. As the Strait of Hormuz remains blocked, the Bank of England warns that inflation may exceed 6 percent within a year. In the first quarter of this year, company registrations dropped by 8 percent, with closures outpacing start-ups. Twenty-seven percent of businesses in the accommodation and food-service sector — of which Greggs is a part of — reported declining turnover as the latest CBI retail index show consumer confidence drop to -63 points in April, the lowest since records began in 1983.

This is what a low-trust economy looks like: sluggish, boring, and expensive. The economic dynamism which our politicians often laud harks back to a notion more subtle than market sentiments: the shared understanding that people maintain due regard for one another. Once that is taken away, what we have left is a Britain where every transaction must be supervised and every sausage roll handed over like a smuggled good. 

The way back to restoring trust in the marketplace involves remembering that order is the precondition to freedom, not its enemy. While contract law and price signals are integral to the functionality of markets, it is the various acts of honesty in simple business interactions — charged by mutual interest — that form the grease that lubricates the engine of free enterprise. Much needs to be done to restore the sense of freedom and trust which long defined Britain and underpinned its economy. Law and order is one element certainly, but there are many more policy failures to blame, from immigration and integration to the entitlement culture created by our welfare state.

Until then, Greggs in West Croydon would remain a cautionary tale to us all: a nation that cannot trust itself to leave hot food on a shelf has misplaced something even more treasured than a sausage roll.