ENJOY browsing while you can. Fill your basket or trolley with items you pick from the shelves while you can. And use the human-operated checkout or oxymoronic ‘self-service’ tills while you can. Because it will all change in the near future. ‘Shopping’, as we know it, will become a thing of the past.
You may recall the infamous World Economic Forum video, widely viewed during the lockdown in 2020, showing how society would change by 2030. Purchases would be delivered by drone. Already shops are struggling against online competition: every time you order something from Amazon a product is left on a retailer’s shelf, and eventually the store closes. Supermarkets are busy but an increasing proportion of their trade is distributed direct to the customer’s home. Restaurants are making as much money from takeaways delivered by Just Eat or Deliveroo as from their tables.
The technocratic Great Reset, as promoted by the WEF, is steadily transforming how we live, whether we like it or not. The goal of the predatory elite is total control of population and resources; civil liberties and social interaction are barriers to its fulfilment. Our every exchange will be recorded in real time. This is why cash is being replaced by digital payment, why homes are fitted with smart meters, why electric cars are completely tracked, and why CCTV is installed throughout every town.
Thirty-two years ago I went to Russia for the first time, and on subsequent visits I observed the gradual Westernising of shops. For a while shops retained the former Soviet Union system of three-stage purchasing. You wanted an item on display in a locked glass cabinet, and you got a ticket for it. A storeman would go to find it from stock, you took the ticket to the cashier to pay for it, and then you collected the item from the end of the counter. It was like a less efficient version of Argos.
We see shops closing everywhere now, with gloomy gaps on the high street. It is easier for the likes of Debenhams to sell entirely online. A shop requires staff, heating and lighting and other overheads, all contributing to higher prices than customers would pay on the internet.
It must be understood that shops are disappearing not because of market adversities. They are closing because market adversities have been created to result in their closure. One of the ways in which stores are being attacked is shoplifting, which has now become so rife that security officers with body cameras are a ubiquitous feature of the retail environment.
As I shall explain, shoplifting is being used as a problem-reaction-solution mechanism. Hardly a day goes by without my newsfeed telling me of another retail chain securing its wares in some way, or spying on customers at the tills. As I write it’s Greggs, which according to the Sun ‘makes a major change to stores to tackle soaring shoplifting rates’. Sandwiches and bottled drinks are moving from self-service refrigerators to behind the counter.
As the BBC reported, shoplifting in England and Wales has reached an all-time high in police records, with 516,971 offences last year – 20 per cent up from 2023. The Metropolitan Police, which recorded 90,000 incidents in 2024, stated that shoplifting is ‘spiralling out of control’. Is that surprising when those who are caught get little or no punishment? Often shopkeepers will not bother to call the police – it’s worse than a waste of time as the insurance premiums rise accordingly.
If you have any doubt that the authorities would do anything deliberate to harm the high street consider the restrictions on car parking and the lack of political action to stop banks and post offices closing.
A revealing policy was enacted in San Francisco in California. This is a divided city, comprising an affluent class working in the tech sector, and a metastasising ‘Skid Row’ of homeless drug addicts. The former live in blissful ignorance of the latter, largely because they do not venture downtown – they have no need, as they buy everything online and go to exclusive dining and leisure venues far from the madding crowd.
Imagine trying to run a retail business in San Francisco after the law was changed by the state of California to excuse shoplifting to the value of up to $950. Store managers told staff not to intervene in shoplifting, partly because there would more loss in an injury claim than from stolen stock.
As reported in 2021 by the New York Post under the headline ‘Mobs of looters are grabbing goods in California thanks to downgrade shoplifting laws’ (with videos showing the brazen theft):
‘The shoplifting problem represents a deliberate choice rather than an unstoppable tide. Modern societies long ago figured out how to maintain civil order such that the law-abiding people could buy and sell goods without being systematically preyed on by thieves. It’s just that the Bay Area has chosen to forget.’
Consequently, a multitude of big-brand retailers closed the shutters. The loot, ironically, was often sold online – which is how the technocrats want us to transact.
The authorities don’t really want criminals to prosper, though. Shoplifting is being escalated to a major problem. This generates a reaction (something must be done), and the desired solution is more security. As such, products will increasingly be kept out of reach until purchase. This will detract from the shopping experience and remove any benefit from visiting a store.
The solution, in tune with the Great Reset, is comprehensive control of merchandise. And the best way to do that is to make all ordering online. Shoplifters will be left with nothing to shoplift.
