Waitrose owner John Lewis Partnership has said that it is “greed not need” prompting high levels of shoplifting as it rolls out a series of new security measures to tackle retail crime.
“Shoplifting and retail crime have been a growing problem across the industry . . . we wanted to see what was the cumulative effect of doing more than one thing,” John Lewis Partnership director of central operations and security Lucy Brown told the Financial Times.
“There’s a depressing narrative around cost of living and that shoplifting is because of that. I’m not seeing that. I describe it as absolutely greed, not need. There are lots of people, they shoplift for as many hours in the week as I work, which is a lot. It’s basically their occupation.”
Brown’s comments come as the retailer rolls out technology in some of its store to stop trolleys if they haven’t been paid for, upgrading CCTV systems, as well as installing more public display monitors near high-value product aisles, such as alcohol and meat.
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“The monitors act like mirrors and “they show what we can see”, Brown added. “Bluntly, people don’t like to see themselves steal. If you went to a shop in the ’80s and ’90s, they often [had] mirrors — and we still deploy mirrors in certain areas because they show stuff like ‘quiet corners’ — but they absolutely work in terms of deterring people from shoplifting.”
“You get organised gangs . . . They will strip the shelves . . . They’re doing that for resale. You then get prolific offenders, who are described as having chaotic lives, and they are generally stealing to feed their own addiction or they are stealing to swap something to feed that addiction.”
Brown’s comments come amid a period that has seen a surge in retail crime, leading John Lewis chair Dame Sharon White to call the issue an “epidemic“.
Last month a new survey from he Office for National Statistics suggested that shopper theft had began to ease, falling to 26% last year – however this is only 2% less than its record high of 28% in 2022.
The Waitrose and John Lewis partnership is not the only business implementing a range of measures in an attempt to crack down on retail crime and shoplifting.
Last year Aldi introduced an initiative where staff would inspect the contents of customers bags, many grocers have introduced receipt security gates over the checkout area, while earlier this year, Morrisons came under fire from its customers over its use of a new CCTV device dubbed ‘Robocop’, which shoppers said made them feel “like a criminal”.
