Waitrose fires employee who stopped a shoplifter from stealing Easter eggs

Monday blog

Welcome to Starmer’s collapsing Britain and ‘Sir’ Sadiq Khan’s lawless London.

A long-serving Waitrose employee was sacked after stopping a suspected shoplifter stealing a bag of luxury Easter eggs.

Walker Smith, 54, was working at the supermarket’s Clapham Junction branch in south London when a shopper alerted him to the alleged theft. “They told me someone had filled up a Waitrose bag with the eggs,” he said. Mr Smith said the suspect was known to staff and had targeted the store before.

He confronted the individual and “grabbed the bag”, but the person pulled it back, leading to a brief struggle. The bag split during the scuffle, sending Lindt Gold Bunny Easter eggs, worth £13 each, crashing to the floor. The shoplifter then fled.

Mr Smith said he was previously told not to approach shoplifters but the toll of repeatedly seeing them get away with theft spurred him into action. “I’ve been there 17 years. I’ve seen it happen every hour of every day for the last five years,” he said. “It’s everybody from drug addicts to teenagers nicking bits and bobs or walking out with bottles of wine in their arms. We’re not allowed to do anything.”

He said security had been scaled back in the shop, with no guards working on Mondays and Tuesdays because “shoplifting incidents aren’t reported enough”.

Official figures show there were 519,381 shoplifting offences recorded in England and Wales in the year to September 2025, a 5 per cent rise on the 492,660 logged the previous year, according to the Office for National Statistics. So that makes around 1,500 a day, though most probably don’t get reported.

Here’s a video of the incident: