‘Listen lad, if you don’t let me past I’m going to bounce this off your fuckin’ head.’
These were the words of a furious man about to steal a microwave; words I will never forget.
I didn’t choose the supermarket security life, the Asda chose it for me. To get off the dole in 2016 I applied for the Asda recruitment pool. For reasons still unknown, they chose me, a man in his early twenties with no prior experience and the body mass index of a chopstick to deter shoplifters and keep the retail peace.
The microwave incident happened two weeks into the job and made me realise what I would and wouldn’t do for the minimum wage. I would happily turn up and stand there; I didn’t fancy being bludgeoned to death by a man wielding a domestic appliance. Three months later, a man was stabbed in the car park by another man with a samurai sword over a parking dispute. This was a further moment of clarity.
My role was that of a glorified scarecrow, a last resort to keep losses down. Stand at the front, show people you’re there, watch out for theft on CCTV, check receipts on the door. And call the police if it really kicks off. Early on, I shaved my hair off in the hope of looking hard, but it just made me look even sicklier.
The Asda in question was in Hunt’s Cross in Liverpool: a crossroads between the grittiness of Speke and the footballers of Woolton Village. I was lucky enough to watch Coutinho, Mane and Lovren shop live. I also watched the shoplifting greats – the tinfoil-lined Bag for Lifers, the trolley full of meat battering rammers. Now and then, you would rumble someone who had just been putting everything through as a carefully curated mixture of fruit and vegetables on self-service. They’d been doing this for months, whole family shops for under a tenner a go.
And then there was the refined teamwork of the tiki-taka basket crew. They worked as a unit. One would come in and fill a basket full of expensive items like printer cartridges or razor blades and leave it somewhere. Someone else would come in and move the basket to a camera-blind spot to remove the tags. The others would stand around a high-value area as a ruse while someone else wheeled the untagged goods out in a trolley. Sometimes these people were foiled, other times they got away with it.
While I now appreciate that most people see supermarket security as a team of fleece-clad grasses, there was no moral judgement. There were times when visibly desperate parents, kid in tow, were caught stealing the basics and the customer service desk just paid for it. No questions asked. Occasionally colleagues would go to the toilet or on their break if a shoplifter that lived nearby came in. Nothing to do with inside jobs, just a sensible way to not get your windows bricked.
