San Francisco’s shoplifting epidemic is shocking to behold. But we shouldn’t imagine that the same couldn’t happen here. In fact, we’re well on our way. According to the British Retail Consortium, theft from stores across 10 UK cities is up by 26%. More, “incidents of violence and abuse against retail employees have almost doubled on pre-pandemic levels.”

On Tuesday, Asda Chairman Stuart Rose told LBC that “theft is a big issue. It has become decriminalised. It has become minimised. It’s actually just not seen as a crime anymore.”

In the absence of an adequate response from the authorities, retailers are beginning to take defensive measures. For instance, home furnishings company Dunelm is now locking up duvets and pillow cases in cabinets; Waitrose is offering free coffees to police officers to increase their visibility; and Tesco plans to equip staff with body cameras. 

The “progressive” response to this phenomenon isn’t quite as deranged as it is in in the US. Nevertheless, British liberals have responded as expected. A piece in the Observer is typical. You’ll never guess, but apparently it’s all the Tories’ fault: “Starving your population and then ‘cracking down’ on it for nicking baby formula or a can of soup can start to make a government look rather unreasonable.”

But as the writer ought to know, the issue here isn’t the desperate young mum hiding a few groceries in the pram. Nor is it the schoolboy pilfering the occasional bag of sweets. Rather, the real problem is blatant, organised and sometimes violent theft of higher value items. Criminals who never previously thought they could get away with it increasingly now do — thus presenting a material threat to retail as we know it. 

But instead of addressing the issue head-on, the writer blames the victim: “Once goods were kept behind counters, but since the birth of large supermarkets they have been laid out near the door, ready for the taking.” How terribly irresponsible of them! On the other hand, perhaps the open display of goods isn’t just a convenience for customers, but instead the hallmark of a high trust society. 

In fact, modern shops are a minor miracle of civilisation: public spaces, stacked high with products from all over the world, that passing strangers may freely inspect and handle, but which aren’t looted by anyone who feels like it.

Surely, that’s something worth defending. But if you’d prefer to abandon retailers to their fate, then don’t moan when they do what it takes to survive. Some will close, of course, and others will move their operations online. Those who stay open will guard themselves and their stock behind plexiglass and electronic tags. And then there’s the hi-tech solution: the fully automated and completely cashless store, in which customers have to be authenticated to even get in. 

Remember that retail facilities like this already exist. One day, when they become the norm, we’ll remember what shops used to be like. Then, we’ll ask why no one stood up for them.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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I don’t know anyone who uses Threads. Perhaps you don’t, either. Yet, according to new data from analytics firm Similarweb, the Meta app now attracts more daily users than Elon Musk’s X — at least on mobile. As of 7 January this year, Threads had 141.5 million daily active users on iOS and Android, whereas X had 125 million.

If the data is accurate — and tracking social media numbers can be something of a dark art — then it tells us important truths about the current social media landscape. The first is never to rely solely on one’s own network for a sense of where the internet is heading. But perhaps the most important takeaway from the rise of Threads is that critics underestimate Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta at their peril.

Threads was created, in part, to troll Musk. As the Tesla founder made his new ownership felt with sweeping changes at Twitter in 2022, Zuckerberg turned to Instagram boss Adam Mosseri to quickly build and launch a rival.

The platform has had its ups and downs since launching in 2023, as an initial influx of 30 million users failed to translate into repeat customers. But Meta has not lost faith. It singled out the app by name as one of its top priorities for 2025 in its most recent annual report. Rolling out new features and pushing Threads content into the feeds of Facebook and Instagram users appears to have worked. It should hardly be a surprise: Meta’s products are used by 3.5 billion people every day, and that reach can be leveraged for almost anything.

While X might feel like a big deal for the twittering classes, it’s long been orders of magnitude smaller than Facebook and Instagram — even in the US, its biggest market. Its relative popularity in certain countries, including the UK, also distracts from the global picture. People are more likely to be using TikTok, YouTube, or China’s everything-app WeChat than they are to be on X.

Numbers aren’t everything, of course. X remains a place where influential people in politics, business and media shape the discourse. Its content lives a second life in screenshots circulated on Instagram accounts and Reddit forums. Who ever heard of a meme originating on Threads? Where Musk’s team may need to worry, though, is if the platform continues to bleed more of these tastemakers.

For now, they are helped by the splintered state of the social media landscape. Even though there are only a handful of social media platforms with scale, owned by even fewer companies, the actual user experience can feel disparate. Users dissatisfied with X, for example, have a vast array of competitors with text-based feeds to choose from, including Threads, BlueSky, Substack Notes, Mastodon, and LinkedIn.

The competition can be exciting; it can also be exhausting. People frequently leave X, proudly proclaiming they will be using Bluesky instead, only to essentially drop off the face of public social media. The effort of rebuilding the social networks which give these platforms value is often too great.

This is where the warm embrace of the Meta “family” — as it calls its app collection — can be hard to resist. When a new user joins Threads, they can choose to automatically follow everyone on the new app whom they already follow on Instagram. Digital connections remain intact, and there’s almost a “devil you know” attitude towards Zuckerberg. If Threads continues to grow, it may be able to capitalise on the impression that it has “won” the battle to be the go-to X alternative, triggering another exodus of those who are still waiting to jump.

Dissatisfaction with X may look like an opportunity for smaller competitors to emerge but, as things stand, it looks to be benefiting an even bigger social media company.