Crime has always been an issue in retail. However, the last few years have seen significant levels of crime hitting the retail industry in several key ways. Customer aggression has been one of the most notable forms of retail crime in the last few years, but growing levels of theft and organised retail crime are beginning to hit businesses across the sector. In the US, for example, department store Target recently blamed a US$593 million reduction in its gross profit on organised retail cr
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“We know we’re not alone across retail in seeing a trend that I think has gotten increasingly worse over the last 12 to 18 months,” Target CFO Michael Fiddelke said.
Closer to home, a chain of IGA supermarkets in Perth has recently had to restrict unsupervised children under 16 years of age from entering after 6pm due to rampant shoplifting.
The chain’s general manager Kyme Rigter told PerthNow that staff were confronted by shoplifting “half a dozen times a day” across the sites.
It appears that retail crime is getting worse, but is that really the case? And if so, what is causing it?
Customer aggression on the rise
Customer aggression has been on the rise from the beginning of the pandemic, with supply chain shortages, as well as the general anxiety around Covid-19, causing many to take frustrations out on other people – including staff.
And despite the fact that purchasing limits have largely been phased out, and supply chain issues have been reduced, many customers are still showing heightened levels of aggression in-store.
According to an upcoming report by Professor Michael Townsley from Griffith University’s Criminology Institute, on behalf of the Profit Protection Future Forum, increased customer aggression is driving retail workers to exit the profession.
“From a team member perspective it’s driving turnover, burnout and some disillusionment – people don’t get into retail to be abused,” Townsley told Inside Retail.
“It’s taking a toll on people, and they’re leaving retail. And what we’re hearing is that retailers are then struggling to replace those staff, even when offering attractive hourly rates, to the levels they want.”
A lack of staff, Townsley added, means remaining workers have less support to do their own jobs, and makes stores more of a target to both organised and impromptu crime.
Worse still is that the figures reported to management and associations are likely just the tip of the iceberg.
Many instances of aggression, bullying and harassment of retail staff go unreported, as employees simply accept it as part of the job, or play down the seriousness of an event, meaning that the actual figure is higher than what is understood.
“This is something that we understand to be called the ‘dark figure of crime’ – there’s more crime committed than is reported,” Townsley explained.
“The problem is that if you don’t understand the scope of the problem, you can’t do something about it.”
Townsley urged retailers to make it as easy as possible for staff members to report customer aggression and product loss.
Stealing to eat
Retail theft actually fell during the pandemic, due to the fact that many stores had guards stationed at their entrances and exits, as well as the fact that fewer people were allowed in in-store at one time, making for fewer opportunities to steal without being noticed.
Now that bricks-and-mortar retail is back in full swing, retail theft has spiked – but the items being stolen have changed.
According to Townsley, an annual Criminology study recently found that, in comparison to prior years, more perishables and meat are being stolen now .
“These aren’t necessarily organised crime units that are doing this, and it strikes me that it rhymes with the increased cost-of-living pressures,” Townsley said.
“We’ve got people that wouldn’t have stolen in the past, but now steal just to eat, or to provide for their family. It’s quite concerning.”
Why policing retail crime is failing
Townsley’s research, which covers Australia and New Zealand, has found a large disparity between the way the two countries handle retail crime.
In New Zealand, police have a dedicated retail crime unit that operates across the entirety of the country due to the fact that there is one main police force, servicing a smaller geographic area.
As such, New Zealand’s retailers report high levels of satisfaction when it comes to how retail crime is dealt with.
By contrast, retailers in Australia have to deal with multiple state police forces, which all have different ways of dealing with retail crime and different levels of funding and manpower, and sometimes different laws – making retail crime often fall by the wayside.
Another difference, Townsley said, is that New Zealand’s retail associations have had a “long standing commitment” to lobbying police for greater attention on retail crime – something that Australia’s associations are now catching up on.
“That’s probably what I would recommend as far as where investment should be for retail associations. They need to be continually drawing the attention of law enforcement to the issues of retail crime,” Townsley said.
