You're nicked

Our staff, for pennies more than minimum wage, are the nation's unsung army of social workers. They bear the brunt of daily life as it is lived by the dysfunctional, the weird and the seriously creepy.

Then, after they've negotiated their way past their colleagues in the tea room they get to deal with the hard cases amongst our customers.

To our collection of crack-pots had recently been added a fairly young man who comes in after dark, always wearing a beanie on his head that he styles with a conical peak. He will spend about an hour in the store with a basket over his arm, pausing to chat with the staff and usually asking to be shown to something in a completely different area of the store.

He is always polite and clean. We tend not to mind the customers who are polite and clean. Indeed after a day of dealing with the usual middle class trash - the sort who cannot bear to bring themselves to be civil to anyone conceivably socially and economically inferior - anyone polite and clean comes as a blessed relief.

But he'll want ponds cream for his mum, or condoms but not pack of three because he 'doesn't want to buy that many' or a particular kind of this or that which we happen not to stock. He usually leaves empty handed having abandoned his shopping basket somewhere about the store and having had a good long natter to a few people over the course of the previous hour or so.

He came to be regarded as a bit of a pain but essentially harmless. The general run of customers, this being a fairly small town, are usually spot on in warning us about problem types and nobody had a bad word to say about him.

Then on Thursday night he was spotted on CCTV helping himself to a £35 bottle of champers. Oops. At a couple of minutes before closing time he lifted the bottle and he scampered, with it under his jacket, through the exit as I was bringing down the steel security shutter almost on his heels.

It was a shame the CCTV footage was only reviewed after he'd left.

Friday morning PC Plod turned up to review the evidence. He was exceeding tall. In fact he was almost as tall as he was pompous. He went so far as to dispute the evidence of the footage and left with a request that we call in the next sighting of the light fingered friend who didn't turn up on Friday evening almost to every one's disappointment. He turned up last night though.

We had almost as many staff in the building as customers and with the exception of the two till operators everyone was deployed on Operation Bollinger. This was not a subtle thing. As special Customer Liaison officer my brief was to explain to the bemused that we were on Crime Watch, but there was no reason for alarm. The staff on hands and knees peering through shelving and around corners were only doing their job.

Our target had come in with a taller and equally skinny mate who meandered separately about the store. This tactic of dividing to conquer was only partially successful. Mate got off, presumably with some goods about his person and made good his escape on a train (we're next door to a railway station). Target man was gathered up and taken to the security suite to be baby-sat by a couple of the young lads, for whom this was probably the most exciting thing to happen in their lives since the day their voices broke, pending the arrival of the constabulary.

They did turn up quite promptly and mob handed though PC Pompous was not among them.

Our light fingered friend spent the night in their company and we are not expecting to see him again any time soon. In the familiar parlance he is Known to the Police. Indeed not only the police but the judiciary and wardens of one or more places of post-sentence incarceration. He's not long out after spending three and a half years away. And you don't spend three and a half years away in this country anymore unless you've done something seriously wrong.

And that is probably why one woman customer last night, having worked out what we were all up to and who we were after muttered "be careful; really, be careful" to me as she walked past on her way out.