Last week, posting provocateur and friend-of-the-blog Himbonomics got into a rolling spat on Twitter. The subject was a sign in Greggs imploring people to be nicer to the staff. In taking objection to this, James attracted all sorts of slings and arrows – but he was right. These signs are not just useless, but detrimental, partly because they detract from engaging with the actual issues, but also because of the visual clutter they become. They spoil the environment and serve as a reminder of the breaking of the social fabric. Ultimately, they are both a part and a reminder of the enshitificiation of our lives.
At a basic level, no one can blame Greggs for putting up a sign like this. No one wants to see shop staff abused. Equally, shops have an obligation, both legal and moral, to try to keep their staff safe and are pretty limited in the options they have. A poster is a cheap and easy answer for them and the wider societal decay is less of their concern than their own shops and liability insurance. It is one of those decisions that makes sense but becomes pernicious on a societal level.
After all, it is not just Greggs that is throwing up these signs. All around the high street now you are presented with warnings and requests to be nice and decent. Waitrose has recently rolled out stickers for self-checking that note that while they “trust” you, they are “watching” you swipe your groceries. Everything from railways to pubs now seems to be tasking their graphic designers with making people not be arseholes.
This has not arisen in isolation. Though crime generally remains quite low, around a quarter of what it was in the nineties, specific offences in the public realm have surged recently. Shoplifting is up 25% from 2022 and is now significantly higher than before the pandemic. Incidents have also got nastier, with abuse of shop workers on the rise. For staff, this is threatening and unpleasant. For businesses, it is a commercial risk – with revenue lost from thievery and liability when staff are hurt, not to mention inefficiencies from regular turnover. The rush to do something is understandable, but it’s hard to see the array of signage as anything but an impotent blight.
Since 2008, the world has been taken with Nudge Theory. Governments have seen it as a way of shaping society without being unduly autocratic. For businesses, it feels like something within their power and something that they can do cheaply. It is the sort of thing that immediately appeals when a company like Greggs is tasked with doing something about anti-social behaviour in stores. Yet its efficacy is unconvincing.
On a grand scale, nudging is a pretty debatable concept. The biggest meta-study found that there was almost no evidence for its success once publication bias was factored in. Often it feels more like a trendy fad than something that works. On a micro-scale, we have perhaps even more reason to be sceptical about these posters.
I find some of the elements of “designing out” crime persuasive. People do adapt to their environments, but this is more often about denying opportunity rather than telling them to be nice. Indeed, in the leading work on these techniques, the nudging signs are just a small piece of a comprehensive approach. It is hard to be convinced they are the most effective. Further research shows when such measures are introduced, it is messages conveying the certainty of punishment that have the most effect, rather than those imploring empathy.
Overall, when Greggs puts up posters like this it feels like it is missing the point. They are an answer to a problem from someone who would never think that way in the first place. A reasonable person’s appeal to the unreasonable. The sort of person who ends up designing these and perhaps picking up Nudge Theory in an airport lounge understands little of their intended audience.
As Ed West often remarks, those who are not prone to violence and disruption rarely understand what motivates it. They do not understand that often people do these things because it feels good and they know no one will stop them. The pain and intimidation of others, which a reasonable person might be dissuaded by, actually urges them on. Reminding them of the victim’s humanity does little.
Others are suffering in their own ways. Most of the anti-social behaviour I’ve witnessed around London has been by people not acting rationally or reasonably. The man shovelling coke into his face on a seven-thirty pm train was likely in the grip of addiction. The woman shouting and shadowboxing strangers on Crossrail had some sort of mental crisis. Neither would have been shocked to be told what they were doing was wrong, neither would have cared. There probably were signs around them telling them to “do better”, they were ignored.
Indeed, these signs seem to be proliferating because we failed to instil order through better means. Over the last decade, the criminal justice system has almost ground to a halt. Cuts to the police have meant fewer crimes are investigated or even properly recorded. Trials are often delayed to the point of becoming ineffective. Now, prisons are so full no more criminals can be sent there. The government has failed to maintain the best deterrent against crime – the high likelihood of detection and punishment. Feel-good posters have taken its place.
On Twitter, many of James’ interlocutors felt this was a cost-free response, that these posters do no harm and can be disregarded by the law-abiding. I disagree – they are detrimental to our public spaces. William Morris’ adage that one should “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” holds for the high street too. It’s hard to know whether these things are useful, but it is certainly clear they are ugly.
This matters. First of all, the presence of these exhortations about anti-social behaviour has a deleterious effect on the law-abiding. They are a reminder of the potential for crime, that your day can be ruined by the violent or disturbed, in a way you can do little to protect against. Their existence also highlights the lack of real protection, that the store is reduced to pleading rather than relying on the presence of effective countermeasures. It is an obvious stitching job on the distressed social fabric that only draws attention to the strains.
Even aside from the message, the extra visual clutter makes public spaces worse. It’s hardly surprising that the most sought-after locations and aesthetics are usually the most neat and minimal. We know that cluttered rooms cause stress and sap focus. Roads filled with distractions mean worse driving. This proliferation of signs and warnings does the same thing to our pedestrian areas. It is a small thing, but it is visually invasive and dispiriting, with garish intrusions adding to the sense of decline. Nothing is encouraging about a sign telling you that the world is getting worse and you are surrounded by potential scumbags.
All of this is compounded by the ultimate neglect of these posters. They are rarely replaced or updated, themselves gradually fading or becoming defaced. All around we still see the remaining COVID warnings – outdated, scuffed, and dirty. From the tube network to supermarkets, 2-metre warnings that might take an hour or two to remove sit there years after they were last needed. Now their only message is the implied “we don’t care about this space”. In part, it is this that worsens our spaces, and perhaps even nudges towards the disorder other messages are trying to push against.
When we talk of political visions for the nation, a simple one is that things should be pleasant and work. These proliferating signs seem like the opposite of this. As James put it, they have the feel of a society giving up on itself – averse to the actual solutions to problems, instead tipping towards pseudo-science deployed like amulets or runes. While it's easy to see why these have arrived on the scene, it is ultimately depressing. A healthy, prospering and stable society doesn’t need this sort of hectoring. Even recently, the UK didn’t seem to need to. We should be striving towards that once more.
I'll admit I also had the instantly negative "oh come on, what harm is it doing and surely it must help in some instances" reaction to the post you mentioned but the rest of your article has convinced me and made me change my mind.
A dissent.
No, these signs aren't going to prevent the habitually violent, or the mentally ill, or those with serious problems with substance abuse from abusing the staff. But that's still a small proportion of the population, and they might, at the margins, remind the the vast majority of reasonable people not to take it out on the shop assistants just because they're having a bad day.
They are also, to borrow from a different element of social psychology, a commitment mechanism to remind the store manager not quietly acquiesce to the low-level abuse of their staff.