With the passing of the Shoplifting Act in 1699, the crime of shoplifting acquired a new prominence. Heightened alarm at retail losses and a pervading belief in the deterrent effect of harsher laws had converged to make shoplifting a capital offence, a notorious status that it retained for the next 120 years. The focus of this book has been how retailers and the wider population experienced and responded to customer theft within the cultural and economic context of the period. It has analysed the crime's social characteristics, its impact on commerce and its potential influence on the development of contemporary criminal justice and material culture, exhibiting the emblematic nature of the offence. The preceding chapters have examined in some detail the demography of those charged with shoplifting, their tactics and shopkeepers’ countermeasures, the nature and significance of what was stolen, and the economic effect of the crime on the retail sector. At the same time the book has followed the changes in retailers’ relationship to the law on shoplifting and concurrent shifts in public attitudes, arguing that in both of these there was a notable transformation in outlook and perception over time.

Shoplifting became an accustomed expedient for some of the most economically vulnerable in society, attracting both men and women. The nation's multiplying stores were increasingly available and the routine of shopping offered a plausible pretext for customers constrained to steal. Theft from neighbourhood shops and those with busy passing trade furnished some of the poorest, largely urban populace with a source of intermittent subsidy. Analysis of the occupational circumstances and times of theft of those prosecuted indicates that shoplifting was only a full-time occupation for a minority of these thieves, for most it was a casual and opportunist means to supplement low incomes or tide them over patches of unemployment. Few shoplifters from higher classes reached court, certainly in part due to retailers’ demonstrable reluctance to suspect or detain such customers. But while we cannot know the degree to which this disguised the scale of middling theft, there is no evidence to suggest it was substantial in this period.