Shameless shoplifters and abusive customers: What it’s really like to work in a supermarket

Every morning when I put on my uniform, I stop and double-check I have everything needed to keep me safe: I slip on my headset so my colleagues can tell me if they’re having problems, I clip a security radio to my trousers, then I attach my body-cam to my lapel, and finally the radio that calls the local police directly. 

It does feel bizarre that I have all this gear on when I go to work; I’m not a security guard or army or in the police. And no, I’m not Batman with a utility belt either. This is the reality of working on the tills in a supermarket in North Wales in 2023. It’s hardly a warzone, yet we face daily abuse. We get sworn at and even spat on regularly. Shoplifters are shameless and aggressive. 

If, when I started, you’d told me this is what working in a supermarket would look like in 2023, I wouldn’t have believed you.

I’ve worked in supermarkets as a checkout supervisor for nearly 20 years and there’s always been abuse in stores. I’m at the end of the shopping experience so by the time customers get to me, I’m the one they tend to take it out on. If they can’t find the things they want or they’ve had to queue, I get the brunt of it. 

But since lockdown, the abuse has massively increased. Things have gone off the scale. You’re just trying to help people but they become abusive and threatening over the slightest thing. I’ve seen colleagues having things thrown at them. I have been spat at. I’ve been threatened countless times. It’s daily. I call home on my break and my husband has this joke where he says: “How many times have you been abused up until now?” Most days I lose count.

I think, now there is the cost-of-living crisis, people are taking their money worries out on us, too. People are frustrated in supermarkets because all the prices have risen. Even the slightest cost query is a drama. In the past they’d have said: “Oh, can you just check the price of that?” Now they want to fight about how much the cost has gone up. You often get a mouthful of abuse about prices – obviously we have no control of that, we’re in the same boat as well. Our shopping has gone up the same amount as everyone else’s. 

Customers seem to think it’s normal to shout at us. Not everybody is like that, obviously, but it’s no longer shocking if a colleague tells me they’ve been sworn at on their shift. It isn’t an exception to the rule now, it just happens all the time. 

I once had a group of youths saying they knew what time I finished work and they’d be lying in wait for me when I got out. I don’t know what they intended to do but they weren’t happy that they’d been refused energy drinks. That was one. 

And there was a middle-aged gentleman who really stepped up and got into my face, quite threateningly, trying to intimidate me because we were sold out of what he wanted to buy. 

I’ve seen colleagues have tins of soup thrown at them. Often at check-outs it’s because they haven’t been able to find what they wanted on the shelves, so that annoys them, then having to wait for a check-out so by the time they get there they’re steaming and throwing things. 

Self-service machines are a flashpoint. Obviously all the supermarket bosses believe automation is the way forward so they remove the manned check-outs and put in lots more self-service units. Some people don’t want to use self-service, but they also don’t want to queue for a check-out so either way they’re unhappy. 

You have people ranting and raving at you about how stupid they are, about how they’re doing us out of jobs. And, well, don’t we know it? We’re the ones who are at risk and those people are doing nothing but making our lives miserable. They abandon their shopping – “you can keep that lot, I’m not going through self-serves” – then we have to get that stuff back on the shelves within half an hour. That means one less person to be on the manned check-outs which compounds the problem. 

It’s funny, until you start talking about it you don’t realise how often and how commonplace it is. It’s not that I accept it, we shouldn’t have to accept it, but it’s just not out of the ordinary anymore. 

Ultimately the triggers are whenever things have changed. When it went from Challenge 21 [asking for ID as a matter of course to anyone who looked under 21 to avoid shop workers facing criminal charges if they accidentally sold alcohol to an underage customer who looked older] to Challenge 25, we started getting more complaints. When they introduced self-service tills, we got a lot of complaints about those. When the government’s Covid regulations came in, people shouted at us about those. Food prices are increasing, bag charges, problems with the self-scanning units –it doesn’t matter the specific issue, people are just angrier.  

I wish I could name a specific “type” of customers who are the worst, but I’ve been called a “f------ bossy b----” by old ladies in their 80s just as many times as by 18-year-olds. 

I’m quite tough and I’m used to dealing with it but I’ve known colleagues who are signed off work with stress or who dread coming into work. Some people refuse to work late shifts because they know there’ll be less staff around if something does kick off. 

The company supplies all these security gadgets but it’s not cheap. I don’t know this for sure, but I’d imagine that cost does probably end up being passed to consumers.

The body-worn cameras are broadly a good thing, though I think. I feel safer when I wear one. They act as a deterrent (although some people get more angry when they think they’re being filmed). It’s helpful but it’s not everything we need. Ideally we’d want more security guards but there’s no chance that’s going to happen. They’ve put up CCTV to save on manpower, but the CCTV never gets used.

Shoplifting is definitely on the increase but we’re told never to confront shoplifters. Instead, we’re told to just make sure people are aware we’re about, to make our presence known, walk up and down the aisles, but we’re told not to confront shoplifters because that can be a threat against our safety. Unfortunately the body-worn cameras will be useless at detecting that. 

The issue now is that abuse and violence towards shop workers don’t result in any punishments. Ideally I’d want people to think twice before being abusive because they knew that there’d be a consequence. As it stands there are no consequences to it. They might get a telling off, they might get banned from the store even (but give it a short length of time and security forget their faces and they’re not banned really). 

People need to be more wary of doing these things because they know they’re going to face legal consequences, rather than just being asked not to come back for a while. They feel like those things don’t really matter. 

Ultimately though, customers sometimes seem to forget that we have no control over the prices, we have no control over whether they use a manned or self-service check-out; we can’t fix those issues. We’re not there for any other reason except to make them happy customers. They don’t see that. They just see us as the face of the company and we’re going to get their frustrations no matter what those things are.

I think a lot of retail workers do get treated like second-class citizens. People don’t think of retail as a career. They think of it as a low-paid fill-in job; you do it at university or if you’re working around family commitments. Most of the time, you’re treated like you’re worth nothing because you work in a shop. But some people choose retail. This is my career and I’m proud of it.

As told to Jack Rear