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The British were once called a nation of shopkeepers; now we’re apparently becoming a nation of supermarket thieves. According to a Cambridge University study of shoppers, people are taking advantage of self-service checkouts to slip items they’ve not paid for into their bags. Around one in five shoppers are doing this, blaming how frustrating they find the self-service checkouts. But isn’t this really more about opportunity than irritation with a machine that keeps saying “unexpected item in bagging area”? The thieving shoppers have worked out that without a checkout assistant putting their goods through the till, there’s a chance to get away with not paying for something. Opportunity also played a part in the case of three men who were spotted taking food from the bins belonging to an Iceland supermarket. But this week after a public outcry about the case, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that it won’t be charging them with stealing. Iceland says the food was past its sell-by date and although for health reasons it doesn’t approve of people taking the products, it didn’t think it right to prosecute the men either. So what’s the difference between these two ways of taking food from a store? The classic definition of what the law is for – the prevention of harm – is helpful here. Pilfering foods via a self-service checkout harms the store and other shoppers who end up paying higher prices to make up for the lost profits. But taking food that’s already thrown away is not really harming anyone. The law, acting like a beady eye to keep us on the straight and narrow, can shape our behaviour. So too can CCTV while many people misinterpret the Christian God as rather like this as well; that he’s a kind of all-seeing watchman who will punish us if we break commandments like ‘thou shall not steal”. But not all situations are black and white, and a simplistic notion of wrong-doing – which focuses only on the action but not the context – doesn’t always help. So Christian thinking encourages people to develop their conscience, essentially an inner voice that tells us how we should act morally, a voice through which God, or the good, is manifested in us. The three men in the Iceland case argued that the food they took was going to waste which was wrong when people are hungry. It echoes Thomas Aquinas’ dictum that it isn’t theft to take something when people are in extreme need. In other words, circumstances played their part in the moral choice that was made. But frustration with the bagging area – that’s never going to be a good enough excuse for giving into temptation.