What's wrong with this picture?

For the visually impaired or those suffering plain confusion as I was, shortly before taking the photo - it's a supermarket isle, specifically the spirits isle, locked up in entirety. The only way to access the products is by pressing a ‘buzz for booze’ button which calls a member of staff to open it. I was recently recounting the troubling existence of this kind of thing after a trip to Boston (MA), basking in the schadenfreude for a moment before chalking it up to nothing more than overly liberal blue state policing policy. How quickly humbled was I to see this in my local Morrisons only a few months later. In a reasonably quiet suburban area of Greater Manchester, the store supervisor told me they were losing ￡2000 per week from this isle alone, hence the new bulletproof barriers. For the rest of us preferring to buy our items, I’ll certainly think twice before impulse buying that weird-looking local Gin on offer; anyone who’s waited at an unattended self-checkout will sympathise. While maybe a good thing for our personal finances and health, a market wide decline in spirits sales is inevitable and will be substantial as a result; felt by the retailers and spirits suppliers who are already on their knees. How bad must things be when retailers are willingly decreasing sales?

Tesco have been criticised for their ugly cage-style theft system for spirits, but there's something about this installation which feels even more repressive to me. Call it a leap, but seeing this genuinely makes me feel like the evolving project of our government and politics has become nothing but a silly meta game of rearranging furniture. How have we seemingly forgotten the objective of society is first and foremost to reduce violence and increase trust and civility in the population? Broadly achieving this is the only bright line enabling a term like 'the developed world' to exist. For many, ’Freedom' has seemingly become nothing but a throwaway slogan used to justify opinion without reasoning, and something to shout at the weekends. Ultimately, freedom begins only when we can trust in one another to abide by the golden rule. It's difficult to see this type of installation quickly normalised, and not feel we're sliding scarily backwards from our foundational ideals.

We often question the accuracy of our subjective sense of crime increasing, made uncertain by our algorithmic media diet. However walking into a store and seeing this quickly sends a concrete signal that something is going severely wrong. Interestingly, the ONS statistics on theft actually show a downward trend. However, since the policing policy for shoplifting has become one of determent rather than enforcement, I'm guessing most theft goes unreported and therefore isn't represented in the data.

My hunch on how the birth of these ‘buzz for booze’ buttons came to bear in a quiet suburb, is a resulting combination of several compounding factors. Increasing (unreported) cases of theft driven by socio-economic pressures, enabled by erroneous policing policy, leading to ever narrowing retailer margins (necessitating shrinkage reduction), and in the case of Morrisons specifically, a malignant injection of crushing PE debt.

Ultimately, the threat of arrest should be enough of a deterrent. If that deterrent has ceased, as I've been told by retail staff, this has forced private businesses to further adopt the role of law enforcement. An embarrassing stain on the state of our public services and the beginning of a dangerous slippery slope.

Whatever's going on, ultimately we all suffer. A poor customer experience, decreased sales for retailers and the spirits sector, more pressure on retail staff. Perhaps most depressingly, what I'll see every time I'm confronted by my own reflection in this tampered plastic, the sense of living in a country travelling slowly backwards.