Each November, the bustling Brunel Retail Park in Reading, Berkshire, would see the staff at Next gearing up for the holiday rush.

As Christmas approached, the store was adorned with festive decorations, but there was one more familiar element to anticipate: a frequent visitor whom employees dubbed Aftershave Man.

This individual, in his early 30s and often carrying a sizable bag, would casually make his way to the menswear department, picking up multiple boxes of aftershave in one go.

“We knew to expect him around the holidays,” recalls Tianara Griffiths, 39, who worked at the now-shuttered Next location for seven years until 2022, before transferring to the Reading town center store.

Occasionally, others would accompany him to create a diversion. “People would rush over to see what the fuss was about, only to discover Aftershave Man had made his move,” explains Tianara. More often than not, though, he operated solo, aware that employees were instructed not to confront shoplifters.

“It’s an unusual predicament,” Tianara admits.

‘They know you can’t touch them and use it to their advantage.’

According to the most recent Office for National Statistics figures available, 530,643 shoplifting offences were reported in England and Wales for the year ending March 2025, a 20 per cent increase on the previous year and the highest figure since records began in 2003.

Inflation and the cost-of-living crisis are drivers, while all the retail workers I spoke to for this investigation say there’s something else that makes stealing surge: Christmas.

‘Christmas is a huge financial pressure for lots of households,’ says Cliff Lee, director of wellbeing services at the charity Retail Trust. ‘Stores are busier. It makes it harder to see what is going on. There’s a focus on gift products that look appealing.’

The cost to the industry is huge. According to the British Retail Consortium, losses from customer theft reached a record £2.2billion in 2023/24, with retailers investing £1.8billion on security measures such as CCTV last year.

Last week, it emerged that the largest ever private security operation was being planned in London’s West End with businesses deploying private security guards to roam the streets to help identify and detain suspects.

But what about the retail staff on the front line of the festive shoplifting epidemic, for whom the simple act of going into work can feel like warfare?

‘We’re hearing every day from colleagues who’ve been assaulted and abused by shoplifters,’ says Cliff. ‘We recently had to support a colleague who was hospitalised and put in an induced coma from an attack.’

Tianara, a single mum to an 11-year-old son, says shoplifters vary from scruffy young people working in groups to lone chancers taking advantage of stores’ festive displays, ‘trying to save money’.

One Christmas at another Reading branch of Next that Tianara worked in, the store positioned rails of £120 leather jackets at the front of the shop facing the road.

‘It was supposed to be appealing for customers. When the store was busy, this man got off his bike, grabbed the whole rail of coats, got on his bike and sped away.’

The coats had been tagged, she says, but by the time the alarms sounded, he was long gone.

Staff are instructed not to confront shoplifters ‘because it’s dangerous’. Instead, advice from management was to ask suspected shoplifters ‘lots of questions to put them off’, she says. But sometimes theft ‘happens so quickly you can’t do anything’.

On the odd occasion, she did manage to get stock back, recalling one Christmas when a young mother set off the alarms as she walked out with her buggy.

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘I think someone’s left the tag on.’ Then Tianara spotted a beauty gift bag and a bunch of women’s cardigans, hangers still on, spilling out from a bag under her buggy. The woman protested her innocence, her baby, effectively, a decoy. ‘That’s what made it sickening.’

Police were called and the woman, already known to the retail park as a shoplifter, received a warning. It took two years but she was eventually convicted of shoplifting and imprisoned.

If goods stolen are worth £200 or less, the maximum prison sentence for shoplifters is six months. If goods are worth more than £200, the maximum jail term is seven years.

In reality, few shoplifters are prosecuted, with the Metropolitan Police reporting only 5.9 per cent of shoplifting incidents recorded by them led to a charge in the year ending March 2025. Perhaps because the risk of punishment is so remote, shoplifters are brazen.

‘The amount of empty packaging you’d find in fitting rooms, security tags…’ sighs Tianara. ‘People change their own shoes, leave them on the hanger and walk out with a new pair of trainers, because shoes aren’t tagged.’

She says at Next security guards weren’t hired until the shoplifting got ‘really bad’. Then, when theft invariably went down, the guards left, ‘and it started up again’.

The effect on staff morale was palpable. ‘You’re trying to earn a living and people are stealing,’ says Tianara, who left retail in 2023 to work in the education sector. ‘What’s the point of coming to work when nothing’s getting done about it?’

According to a survey from the Retail Trust, 43 per cent of shop staff say they are being abused or attacked every week, and 77 per cent have experienced intimidating behaviour in the last year.

Hannah Louise, 28, was a junior sales assistant in the Caerphilly branch of Boots during Christmas 2021 when a man wheeled a bicycle into the store and headed straight to the razor section – razors being one of the most shoplifted items, says Hannah. Anything priced higher, such as electric toothbrushes, is displayed in empty boxes – and thieves know it.

The razors were attached to shelves in plastic packaging with security tags, but this man ‘yanked it so the whole packaging broke,’ says Hannah, who, hearing the ‘clatter’, moved to the door and noticed the man ‘had a big, expensive razor in his hand.’

Before she said a word, she recalls, ‘he told me to f*** off and lunged towards me’. Hannah put her hands up in surrender. ‘I didn’t know if he was going to throw something at me or use his bike. He had such malice with his demeanour. I felt he did not care if he added an assault charge to his potential list of crimes.

‘You really get the feeling, ‘I could make the wrong move and I’ll get punched in the face.’

The man cycled off, ‘and we couldn’t do anything’, she adds. ‘We didn’t have security and were taught don’t try to save the stock at the risk of your own safety.’

Hannah stresses the shops themselves aren’t at fault, ‘but the more retailers do to put security in place, the more extreme measures shoplifters take to surpass them’.

At Boots, shoplifting was ‘standard practice’ she says, with thieves often easy to spot. ‘They’d wear things that could cover their faces quite easily, like hoodies. They would be looking all over the store or huddled around a certain section for an extended period.’

Yet not every shoplifter fits the stereotype – indeed, says Cliff Lee, ‘just because somebody is smartly dressed and smiles doesn’t mean they’re not a shoplifter’.

The same Christmas, Hannah recalls a middle-class woman in her 40s scooping an armful of shampoo bottles off the shelf, ‘and off she went’. Staff contacted security patrolling the wider area, ‘but by the time they got to our store, she was already gone’.

The following year, Hannah moved from Boots to Game, part of a chain of toy shops. At Christmas, she says, ‘because you want everything to look pretty, you cram the shelves. There is a lot to take without looking suspicious’.

With staff busy at tills serving customers, she adds, ‘there’s not a lot of presence on the shop floor’.

Lego, that most popular of Christmas gifts, was often stolen and the most prolific thief was a man staff dubbed ‘The Lego Guy’. In his mid-30s, wearing jeans and a parka, ‘he didn’t look suspicious,’ recalls Hannah. ‘He looked very unassuming, a bit like a dad.’

For two months towards the end of 2023, The Lego Guy worked his way around local branches of Game.

‘We keep our top items as far from the exit as possible,’ says Hannah. ‘This guy would pick up an expensive Lego set, carry it around the store. His technique was to put the Lego closer and closer to the door so by the third time he’d come through, it was by the door and he’d just take it. He prepped for his next move, as if he was playing chess.’

Hannah, by then an assistant manager, had been alerted to his strategy by management. When The Lego Guy arrived at the Caerphilly branch, she ‘clocked’ him from the circulated photo of his face and the fact boxes of Star Wars Lego had begun moving mysteriously around the store.

She hovered near him and, surprisingly, the tactic worked.

‘We might have scared him off. We didn’t confront him. I think the fright of knowing we knew was enough,’ she says, adding he was eventually caught and banned from the store. ‘There’s no way he was that much of a fan that he was stealing from multiple stores. He was probably selling them on.’

Another serial thief was caught by information he’d inadvertently given the store when he had paid for goods, she adds. ‘We tracked down his eBay account, so we knew he was selling the goods on.’

Even then, she doesn’t think he faced repercussions. ‘I don’t think they had enough to charge him.’

Temporary staff hired over the festive season often aren’t as rigorous at de-tagging purchased items, she says, triggering false alarms and creating chaos.

‘You’ve got to not only clock (thieves) but get to them, and by the time you’ve got to them, they’ve gone,’ says Hannah, who left Game last year and now works in tech support.

‘There’s not a lot you can do other than log what’s been taken and get CCTV footage put out in the local community.’

At Greens supermarket in Dundee, Christmas was a time ‘when shoplifting for certain meats got quite extreme – joints of pork, lamb, steaks,’ recalls former manager Michael Fowler.

Stolen items were then sold at the local pub for profit. ‘Some people would give shoplifters their shopping list.’

On December 23, 2023, at around 9.30pm, Michael, 25, spotted a man in his early 40s running out of the store with a shopping basket.

‘That wasn’t uncommon,’ says Michael, who, positioned himself in front of the man at the door. ‘I said, ‘it’s easier for both of us if you just give us the stock back.’ He said, ‘get out of my way you b*****d, I’ve got a knife.’

The thief pulled the knife from the pouch in the front of his grey hoodie, Michael recalls, ‘and he lunged at me. He swung it at my stomach. I stepped back, absolutely petrified, shaking. I feared for my life. I wasn’t grabbing the basket off him at that point. I just thought, I’m not getting stabbed for this, I’ve got family.’

Michael told the two other members of staff to get behind the till, locked the doors and called the police. The shoplifter was caught. Michael gave evidence against him in court the following year. He was sentenced to 18 months for multiple offences.

But the ‘absolutely horrible’ repercussions for Michael carried on long after Christmas. He started having panic attacks. ‘It feels like you’re dying – I wasn’t able to breathe.’

Eventually he left his job at Greens, but working on the shop floor at another supermarket felt equally unsafe, so he moved to a customer services role.

Two years on, he says, ‘I still have nightmares. I wake up sweating, in tears. It’s with me for life. Christmas for retail workers is horrible.’

Ultimately, says Stephanie Michelle, 40, from Conwy, who worked for a book store for five years between 2018 and 2023, we are all victims of shoplifters – costs are hiked to make up for thefts and stores go out of business.

‘These shops are starting to disappear from our streets,’ she says. And all shops are vulnerable. ‘My friend said, ‘You work in a bookshop, how middle class can it be?’ You expect it to happen in supermarkets, but not in a book shop.’

The shop, she says, stocked popular gifts such as Lego and soft toys including Jellycats, the largest of which cost around £70. One Christmas she discovered around 20 missing. ‘I suspect they were sold on Facebook Marketplace.’

Stephanie believes most shoplifting is done in groups, with the intention of reselling the goods. A few people will cause ‘a distraction on one side of the store’, while somebody else shoplifts.

In one particular week before Christmas, she recalls a seemingly ‘normal middle-class family’ with four young children. ‘They were running riot, knocking things over. The mum was standing looking helpless but also trying to get my attention. She kept asking questions.’

The children were, she says, ‘decoys’. The dad sidled off to the other side of the shop. Only after they had left did she realise an entire bottom shelf of novels – around £500 of stock – had gone.

‘You feel it’s out of your control, especially if you’re the only one on the shop floor,’ says Stephanie.

The shop had pictures of repeat offenders from the area, so ‘as soon as they came in, we had to notify security’ in the shopping precinct, she says. In five years at the bookshop, she’s unaware of a single shoplifter being held to account.

Stephanie has now left the sector to work in an art gallery. She is relieved not to have to deal with the Christmas shoplifters this year, but for those assistants still on the front line she has every sympathy: ‘They’re taking advantage of you. It’s horrible.’

Some names have been changed to protect identities.