Barbarians at the Tills? Post-pandemic reflections on violence and abuse against workers in the retail industry

Abstract

The UK retail sector is witnessing substantial increases in violence and abuse towards its customer-facing workers in the post-pandemic era. The costs of this violence to employee wellbeing, local community stability and economic losses to the retail industry are manifold. COVID-19 has been implicated as a central driver in these increases, as the legacy of abuse in retail settings during the pandemic lockdowns continues to affect workers across the sector. This article adopts a series of conceptual tools from critical criminology to argue that rising violence against retail staff cannot be explained by the pandemic alone. Rather, criminology must consider these trends against a background of longer-standing increases in interpersonal violence and rapidly shifting cultural currents under late-neoliberal capitalism. This article also reflects on the hardening of consumer subjectivities and declining deference to mechanisms of authority that continue to manifest under postmodern cultural conditions. These all serve as prominent features in the contextual aetiology of abuse against retail staff and render the possibility of addressing retail violence through deterrence and prevention measures problematic.