Today’s special offer… be searched like a shoplifter says John Sturgis

The Two Ronnies’ classic Four Candles sketch (Image: Getty) The shopping experience in Britain had been steadily degraded over the last decade, so it was little surprise to learn of a new low: shoppers are now being frisked to check they aren’t thieves. Among them, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, as my colleague Caroline Bullock remarked here last week, have introduced checkpoints where bags can be searched. This indignity is merely the latest in a string of negative developments that have made shopping increasingly grim. Most glaringly this has involved inflation – so rampant over the last two years that we now celebrate when the rate at which prices rise goes down, rather than prices themselves. Then there’s the increasing phenomenon of empty shelves – due to wild weather, labour shortages, queues at ferry terminals and a shaky economy. But as well as inflation, I’ve noticed an area of deflation: in parking times. My local Asda used to allow three hours free before you got fined. It got cut to two. At our local M&S you were meant to pay a refundable pound but few did. Now you get a ticket if you skip paying when even a few moments over your free 15 minutes. But perhaps more existentially depressing than these has been the steady erosion of customer care. One  thinks of the classic 1970s Two Ronnies sketch – Four Candles. Its joke relied on the banality of going into a shop and asking a shopkeeper for an item. These days that would seem a barely plausible basis from which to spin the misunderstanding that follows.There was an equivalent of Ronnie Corbett’s hardware store in my hometown, Tunbridge Wells. It closed down after a much larger Homebase opened. More recently when that chain hit financial trouble, a large part of the store was turned into a Lidl. Ticket given at M&S instead of refundable pound (Image: Getty) Now if you want four candles, or indeed fork handles, you’d probably need to drive to the B&Q in the out-of-town retail park. This kind of high street shift has led to a broad decline in the ability of staffs to assist or guide. These days, one usually has to navigate a store unaided because if you ask a staff member whether or where something is stocked, they very likely won’t know. So you go to the self-checkout and have to repeatedly call the assistant when the scales fail to satisfactorily register the weight of every fourth item. When you’re finally adept at finding your own way around, some bright spark at head office insists the whole store layout is changed and you’re back where you started. Staffing is so haphazard that it’s now not uncommon for me to pop into my nearest store, a Tesco Extra, early on a Saturday and find there’s no one to be seen in the place at all, just me, alone, as if I were in a postapocalyptic horror film. No wonder people shoplift. But when they’re busy it’s even worse. You see five full trolleys in a row queueing for the one open checkout. “Could you possibly open another till please?” you plead. “Sorry it’s just me,” replies the understandably stressed cashier at a fresh round of tuts. Then there are security tags to be removed from more and more items because of that rampant shoplifting. Of course, one can understand why they feel the need to take steps like this: shoplifting has risen by as much as 27 percent across 10 of the UK’s largest cities over the last year, according to the British Retail Consortium. Consumer champion Helen Dewdney said: “Supermarkets need to do more to treat customers with respect and decency.” It’s only when we briefly step out of this routine that we realise quite how soul destroying the whole experience is. For me that epiphany came when a recent holiday to France restored the lost notion shopping for food can be a pleasure: in the spectacular markets, of course, but at French supermarkets too. These seemed better run, better stocked and cheaper. The experience of returning to Britain and waiting to be searched while I trudge out with my overpriced shopping in my bagfor-life makes me think of another joke from the 1970s, Woody Allen’s line about the two women complaining about the catering at their hotel. “The food here is terrible,” says one. The other replies: “And the portions are so small.” One can adapt this to shopping in Britain in 2023: it’s terrible and expensive.’ Britain’s shopping experience has been steadily degraded’