“I can tell you that the people that are doing it aren’t the people who are coming here because they’re looking for a sandwich because they’re hungry,”
Thing is, you’re not wrong either. The cost of living crisis does have victims, but the sort of people doing dine and dash are rarely those victims.
If anything they make it worse for people on low income jobs like waiting staff. Dine and dash is like the opposite of leaving a tip. It’s like reaching into an underpaid service workers pocket and pulling the money out.
It’s tricky, especially if we want to stay non-judgemental, but there does seem to be a difference between people trying to steal bread and flour from a supermarket and folk sitting down to a three course and running without paying, and I suspect that difference might be one of class and privilege rather than not.