Only now, there’s not even the excuse of being skint and wanting to drink cheap box wine out of something other than a Sports Direct mug at a house party – the reasoning is simply that they like the design and think it would make a quirky addition to an already extensive glassware collection.
You wouldn’t steal a television.” Twenty years on, it feels like many of us would steal just about anything else though.
But whenever people explain away their pilfering by banging on about “victimless crimes”, the question I always come back to is this: what would happen if everybody decided that they were somehow exempt from the social contract?
But these days, I increasingly feel like an outlier – a hopelessly naive hick amid a sea of otherwise upstanding citizens who believe they’re inherently entitled to a “five-finger discount” whenever they like.
The rationalisation is frequently that “train fares are too expensive”, without any acknowledgement that perhaps the number of people who refuse to pay for an essential service drives up the price for everyone else.
