A teenage fashion brand has shuttered its fitting rooms, citing rampant theft. The move, a modern echo of the Victorian shopkeeper’s wary eye, signals something far graver than a quarterly loss. It whispers of a society in decay, where the social contract is torn asunder by the very generation we have coddled.
British retailers watch with morbid curiosity: is this the beginning of a retail apocalypse or a simple surrender to the barbarians? We must ask: did we raise a generation of thieves or merely reflect the moral vacuum of an age obsessed with instant gratification? The fitting room was a sacrament of trust.
Now it is a crime scene. The decline of Rome began with smaller mercies: bread and circuses, then the collapse of civic virtue. Today, it is a hoodie and a locked door.
We are all complicit.
