Shoplifting epidemic: Security tags on chocolate and staff in terror

Security tags on £2 chocolate bars and staff in daily terror of violent gangs: CLAIRE COHEN investigates the shoplifting epidemic that has turned Britain’s High Street stores into battlefields

• Police data suggests 75% rise in stealing food, drink and items like baby formula
• John Lewis boss said ‘gangs and shoplifters have become much bolder’

When you’ve worked in retail for 20 years, you might think you’ve seen everything. But for Alison, manager of a large branch of one of Britain’s favourite High Street fashion stores, the past few months have been the most unexpected and upsetting of her career.

‘We have seen a huge rise in shoplifting,’ says the 52-year-old, whose branch in East Anglia has become a battlefield. She is too nervous to give her real name.

‘Gangs turn up in vans, smash into the shop, fill their arms with piles of clothing and run out, before driving to the next location and doing exactly the same.

‘Someone stole a load of underwear by putting it on in the fitting room and hanging their soiled pants on the hooks. We see repeat offenders coming in constantly, but all my staff can do is follow them around. There’s no security and we’re almost all female.’

Cyber attacks and online fraud might seem to be the new frontier of retail crime but, according to the experts, it’s old-fashioned bricks and mortar shops that are seeing a significant surge in theft — and shoplifters, with little fear of getting caught, are becoming ever-more audacious.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC), which counts the UK’s biggest High Street chains among its members, from Superdrug to Zara and Waterstones, says that shoplifting across the retail sector in England and Wales has rocketed by 26 per cent in the past year.

Police data suggests a rise of up to 75 per cent when it comes to people stealing food, drink and essential items such as baby formula and laundry tablets from supermarkets

Security tags being attached to sweets and chocolate on Aldi supermarket shelves

Police data suggests a rise of up to 75 per cent when it comes to people stealing food, drink and essential items such as baby formula and laundry tablets from supermarkets.

READ MORE: How did one of UK’s biggest shoplifters get away with it for so long? Mother made £500,000 from shops – including Boots, TK Maxx and John Lewis – by simply taking items off shelves and asking for refunds

Last week, John Lewis boss Dame Sharon White told the BBC that ‘gangs and shoplifters have become much bolder’.

Thieves operating in gangs are the hallmark of 2023: Dame Sharon cited a group of teenage boys who, having unsuccessfully tried to raid the John Lewis tech department in Glasgow, made the hour-long journey to Edinburgh, where they attempted to steal expensive fragrances.

‘They were asked to leave by a member of the security team, who they then aggressively pushed out of the way,’ she says. ‘A customer stepped in to help and, unfortunately, was hurt in the process.’

A dramatic scenario, yes, but not unusual among the employees I speak to. And while all are keen to reassure shoppers that the British High Street is not the Wild West, there’s undeniably a problem — not least because shoplifters can, at times, turn nasty.

In its latest Crime Survey, published in March, the BRC found that there had been eight million incidents of customer theft over the previous year, with shop employees experiencing 867 violent or abusive incidents every day, up from 455 in the last, pre-pandemic survey.

It means that retailers are increasingly having to take matters into their own hands. You’ve probably noticed that high-value meats have been security-tagged for some time now: but things have got so bad in the past few months that even low-value goods have to be protected.

Three weeks ago, the Co-op started putting chocolate bars — some retailing at less than £2 — in locked shelves. Honey, coffee and dishwashing liquid have also been locked down and, incredibly, the Co-op now has dummy bottles of coffee and ketchup on its shelves. Tesco has security tags on razors. In Boots, fragrances and even cosmetics are kept behind closed doors.

In one suburban Boots store recently, a visiting manager was overheard asking: ‘Where is all the make-up?’ To which a staff member replied: ‘It’s had to be put away because of shoplifters.’

That might seem extreme, but then so are the lengths some shoplifters will go to get the goods.

As a student, Grace worked for American clothing stores Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister in London and says that the changing rooms were ‘carnage’.

‘People would take tag removers in with them and you could hear them going “click, click” — it’s a distinctive noise of metal on plastic,’ she says.

‘One woman even had a metal grille in her mouth, like a brace, and was biting off tags with this. Security caught her and she had to be dragged out of the shop with blood dripping down her chin.’

A £5 tub of Lurpak butter being locked behind security tags and netting at Aldi

Security tags attached to four pint bottles of milk at a Tesco Extra in Poole following incidents of shoplifting

She recalls ‘yummy-mummy types’ slotting clothing under their pushchairs. ‘You’re pretty innocent looking, and if you get caught you’ve got the excuse of having just popped the items there before paying, because you’ve got your hands full,’ she says. ‘It’s a get out of jail free card.’

For shop assistants and managers, then, this is a daily battle. ‘They feel scared going to work,’ says Lucy Brown, head of security for John Lewis and Waitrose. ‘They’re not sure if somebody’s going to be assaulted — because some of the gang members are armed — or verbally abused.’

The BRC’s Lara Conradie paints an alarming picture. ‘We constantly hear about people getting death threats, being racially abused and physically assaulted,’ she says. ‘We’ve heard of people being stabbed with syringes. All sorts of terrible things sometimes happen, unfortunately.’ Her advice to customers, she adds, is to never intervene.

Sara, who has a part-time job with an upmarket store in what she calls a ‘posh neighbourhood’ in the West Country, says: ‘It can feel quite dangerous to approach someone when you don’t know how they are going to react.’

She feels frustrated at having ‘no power to physically stop’ shoplifters, and says staff aren’t allowed to speak to them unless they’ve actually seen someone stealing.

‘Basically, we can’t do much. It’s very tricky,’ she says. ‘We have training every few months and are told that we can’t put ourselves at risk.’

Although, she adds, it’s not always easy to follow the rules. ‘A few weeks ago, my manager saw a shoplifter with a £45 bottle of champagne sticking out of her bag. Normally, we’d be careful but, because she knew the woman, my boss walked over to her, took the bottle out of the bag and said, “Now, you can f*** off!” We’ve all felt like doing that.’

Alcohol is clearly a major target, given that staff in a Waitrose store in South London recently mentioned to customers that someone had tried to steal four bottles of Pimm’s.

So who is shoplifting? Dame Sharon blamed the cost of living crisis — and while it’s not possible to pinpoint how many thefts are as a result of financial hardship, recent figures from The Trussell Trust, Britain’s leading food bank network, show that 11.3 million people in the UK faced hunger last year due to a lack of money.

Yet many retail experts are reluctant to attribute the rise to desperate ‘normal people’, pointing out that most who struggle turn to food banks, or family, rather than theft.

‘We do acknowledge that the cost of living has played into it, but we think that crime in society has generally risen,’ says Conradie.

‘Thieves have become a lot more brazen. Criminal gangs are a new trend that retailers are reporting, particularly in cities. They’re stealing tens of thousands of pounds worth of high-value goods.’

READ MORE: Mother-of three, 41, who was ‘attacked by teenage shoplifter’ outside Co-op while PCSO refused to intervene slams police for ‘letting criminals operate with impunity’

Brown puts the culprits into five categories. ‘Some people will be stealing for financial reasons. There are organised gangs. You’ve got people who shoplift to fund things like substance abuse issues. Some are one-offs. And then there are the repeat offenders, who are prolific and spend their lives shoplifting.’

Brown now has more than 1,000 employees working in security, alongside hundreds of third-party guards. She keeps a ‘depressing list’ of every single incident. ‘I don’t think there’s anything that hasn’t been stolen,’ she says. ‘Depressingly, it’s probably easier to say what isn’t attractive [to the thief].’

Particularly desirable are things that can ‘be resold very quickly’ or are stolen to order, such as branded clothing, mobile phones, wearable tech, expensive cookware, alcohol and vapes. But while staff might know which products to watch, it’s less easy to identify a thief.

‘There is no typical shoplifter,’ says Brown. ‘Just today, we had one woman complain when she was detained because we were going to make her miss her flight. In the last week alone, we’ve caught a doctor, four university students and an airline cabin steward.

‘In one branch of Waitrose last week, somebody was detained, the police came out and issued a fixed-penalty notice — which the shoplifter paid before driving off in a brand new SUV. So it’s really difficult to be able to draw a pen portrait and say who this is and what they look like.’

Brown adds: ‘In one John Lewis store, we stopped a retired woman who was attempting to steal £500 worth of clothing. It wasn’t a theft of necessity, as she immediately offered to pay. Despite being caught, she continued to tell us how she “wasn’t that type of person who shoplifted”.’

One reason shoplifters feel emboldened, say the experts, is the apparent lack of punishment. In the BRC’s Crime Survey, 56 per cent of retailers rated the police response as fair, but a considerable number of larger retailers felt it was ‘poor or very poor’. Alarmingly, there has been a significant drop in the number of violent and abusive incidents reported to the police — 100,000 compared with 270,000 the year before — with many retailers citing a belief that nothing would be done, so what’s the point.

Legal action is also declining. In the year to June 2022, 21,279 people were prosecuted for shoplifting in England and Wales, compared with 80,352 a decade ago.

A change in the law in 2014 now means that those charged with the theft of goods below £200 fall under the bracket of antisocial behaviour, and are more likely to receive a fine without having to even attend court — something policing experts have claimed ‘decriminalises’ shoplifting.

Little wonder Dame Sharon told the BBC that police inaction was essentially a ‘licence to steal’. Or as shop manager Alison puts it: ‘The police aren’t interested when we call them. Even on the rare occasions they do get involved, the person just gets a slap on the wrist and goes straight back to stealing.’

The National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for Business Crime, Assistant Commissioner Paul Betts says: ‘Retail crime has a damaging impact on people and business, which is why we are doing everything possible to tackle offenders and support retailers in reducing shoplifting and attacks on retail staff.

‘When responding to shop theft, all police forces have their own response model which considers the threat, harm, and risk of every call.’

Iona Blake, security manager at Boots, tells me the company is specifically targeting repeat shoplifters, who tend to cause staff the most ‘harm and distress’.

‘Incidents of abuse towards our employees are often linked to them trying to prevent shoplifting,’ she says. The pharmacy trains staff in what Blake calls the ‘power of hello’, encouraging them to interact with known shoplifters as they walk through the door, so they are aware of being watched. That seems to be a key part of the solution across the High Street, with body-worn cameras becoming the norm for employees — staff in 350 Boots stores now wear them.

Boots also boasts a round-the-clock CCTV monitoring hub, near Nottingham, to which stores are connected via a ‘panic button’. Once pressed, it prompts one of the 24-strong hub team to make a live Tannoy broadcast directly into the branch — anything from a benign ‘this store is monitored by CCTV’, to a more direct ‘put the items back and leave the store. You are being recorded, the police will be contacted’.

READ MORE: Co-op shops lock up meat worth as little as £3.75 in security boxes as managers try to ‘deter shoplifting’

‘We’ve found it’s really helpful to disrupt people from stealing. The trigger that somebody else is watching you has been useful in de-escalating verbal abuse and stopping thefts,’ says Blake.

At John Lewis and Waitrose, employees can choose to wear body cameras, and mobile security guards rove between stores. Staff have access to wellbeing teams if they are caught up in an incident.

But the company has also come up with a new and very Waitrose way to tackle shoplifting. Called ‘love-bombing’, it’s simply the idea that being extra-attentive to all customers will help to deter would-be shoplifters. The concept was trialled in six branches in March and is now being rolled out across the supermarkets.

‘We’re famed for our excellent service and now it’s been shown to be a real deterrent to people who are considering theft,’ says Brown.

‘For the vast majority of our shoppers, it’ll just seem like the friendly customer service they’d expect from our employees. But for that small proportion who might be considering shoplifting, it can also act as a deterrent, knowing that our Partners are present and attentive.

‘It wouldn’t necessarily work on a gang, but it is preventing lone shoplifters. It’s not about profiling, it’s just about really good service — and if it also stops a thief, that’s a bonus.’

Of course, all this crime-fighting costs money and that has to come from somewhere: simply, customers are footing some of the bill. According to the BRC, last year retailers lost £953 million through theft, and spent a further £722 million on prevention.

Little wonder the Association of British Convenience stores estimates that shoplifting now equates to a 9p ‘crime tax’ on every customer transaction.

So what can be done? There is, the retailers tell me, a growing conversation between Britain’s shops, with businesses sharing information and building bridges with police and crime commissioners to get retail crime higher on the agenda.

In the meantime, says Brown, the stores will continue to pursue shoplifters themselves. ‘We might not get somebody on the day. But we will gather evidence — and we will get them.’

• To protect identities, some names have been changed.

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