Two things happened on the high street this weekend that stuck with me.
The first was Swatch. Queues of resellers wrapped around the block, there to buy plastic watches for £300 so they could flip them online for thousands. Stores had to close their doors early just to manage the chaos. Swatch knew this was coming. These drops are announced. The reseller community organises around them openly. And yet there the brand stood, overwhelmed by people who had no intention of ever wearing what they bought.
The second was uglier. A gang of feral teenagers in hoods attempting to loot a JD Sports in Ilford, caught on camera being chased back up an escalator by female members of staff. The comments underneath the video asked exactly what I was thinking. Where was the security? Why did every bystander reach for their phone before even considering doing anything?
I don’t have answers. But I have questions.
This Isn’t New
JD Sports has been a recurring target for years. The 2011 riots. A viral TikTok trend in August 2023 openly calling on people to loot the Oxford Street branch. Masked raids in Tottenham Hale and Stoke-on-Trent. It even spread to Brussels and Amsterdam in 2019 after a social media storm over comments made by a store manager in Belgium. This is not random. This is a pattern, and the company knows it is a pattern.
So why are young women left to chase teenagers up an escalator?
I’ve knocked on locked doors and waited for a security guard to let me into a shop. I’ve queued behind security at my local supermarket during Covid lockdowns. We adapted to all of that without complaint. So the question isn’t whether visible, serious security is acceptable to the British public. We’ve already answered that. The question is why retailers who know they are targets keep leaving their staff exposed.
The High Street Isn’t Closing Itself
There’s a narrative repeated so often it’s become received wisdom: the internet is killing the high street. Every empty shop front gets the same explanation. Online shopping. Amazon. Changing habits.
I don’t accept it. Not entirely.
People still want to walk into a shop. They want to handle something before they buy it, to be in a space designed with care, to have an experience that a browser tab cannot give them. The appetite is there. What’s corroding the high street isn’t the internet. It’s a combination of things we seem unwilling to name directly, including the fact that organised retail crime has become almost routine, and we’ve quietly decided to absorb it rather than confront it.
I’m a small designer with an online business. One of my genuine goals, when the business is in a position to support it, is to open a boutique. A small, considered space on a high street somewhere. That is not a fantasy. It is a plan. The high street is not something I am writing off. It is something I am working towards.
Which is exactly why footage like this bothers me as much as it does.
I Don’t Have a Solution
I want to be clear about that. I’m not a security consultant. I’m not a policy maker. I’m a designer who watched two videos this weekend and couldn’t stop thinking about what they said about where we are.
What I do know is that the people working those shop floors didn’t sign up to be the last line of defence against gangs of teenagers treating retail as a recreational activity. And the narrative that blames the internet for empty high streets is letting something else off the hook entirely.
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