Plenty of people have indulged in some sort of shoplifting. The onion scam at a supermarket checkout, a drunken dine-and-dash, a felt jester hat nabbed from one of those shops at Glastonbury made out of metal poles, bunting and dreamcatchers – it all counts. But while most amateurs tend to pack it in at puberty, or at least once they're old enough to pay their own bills, for others it can become a full-time career. And around Christmas time, those professional shoplifters are known to considerably step up their game.
Throughout her 45-year stint as a shoplifter, 54-year-old Kim Farry says she made £2 million and took home an average of £50,000 a year. "Because you're not a shoplifter, you couldn't imagine that I could go into a shop and take two grand's worth at a time," she tells me. "It was a living, it was my job. I didn't look at it like I was doing anything wrong, and I think that's why I got away with it."
Nicknamed Britain's "Shoplifting Queen" by the tabloids, Farry first got into five-finger discounts at the age of nine. "I got caught and cautioned for a Marc Bolan badge when I was 11," she tells me. "My dad used to say, 'You want to give it up, you're no good at it, stop thieving,' and I used to think, 'You should look after mum and I wouldn't have to.'"
Shoplifting is a crime as old as retail itself. From ancient Egypt to the Roman Empire, where the punishment for stealing could – in the worst cases – be a death sentence, through to the scammers and pickpockets of 16th century London – who risked being hanged if they were caught – people have always stolen goods from shops, whether out of necessity or just for the thrill of it.
By the early 19th century, shoplifting was no longer a crime punishable by death in the UK and had, according to Kerry Segrave's Shoplifting: A Social History, largely become as popular with women as it had been with men. South London's all-female shoplifting gang the Forty Thieves, founded in 1865, were responsible for the largest shoplifting operation the UK has ever seen, fleecing shops out of thousands of pounds by hiding goods in clothes specifically designed for thievery.
By the 1960s, shoplifting had been rechristened as a political act. In 1971's The Anarchist Cookbook, William Powell wrote that "shoplifting can get you high", while in 1970's Steal This Book Abbie Hoffman declared that "ripping off is an act of revolutionary love". You get the idea; shoplifting was seen as a fuck you to the capitalist system – an ethically-defendable crime. Contemporary counter-cultural groups like the Spanish anarchist collective YomangoYomango (which translates as "I Steal") continue this tradition of ideological shoplifting, distributing their pickings from global corporations to wider society.
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