If you work in retail, how are shopflifters dealt with?

[brightbreezy6]

DS has just started working at a supermarket and came home the other day telling me that some young kids came in, filled up their trolley, broke through the security barriers and went off - security tried to stop them but were unsuccessful. I recently saw a video of some kids in my local area clearing the make-up shelves in Boots and making off. I wonder if the police are called subsequently? I am surprised that nothing more seems to be being done about this, although i worked in a clothes shop as a teen and was told never to touch shoplifters. I read that Sainsburys is going to be using VAR style cameras in their shops - has anyone seen them? I don't think ours has them yet. I don't seen how that will stop shoplifting anyway as the scales clock when you haven't scanned an item,

Yep, that’s pretty standard - or was a few years back. Police no longer routinely attend supermarkets for shoplifting, or if they occasionally do there’s no follow up/actual investigation, it just gets logged. Security do what they can but with the lessening of police presence people are getting more and more brazen. Within 5 years as a duty manager/then store manager/then regional manager, I saw some awful stuff, was physically assaulted a few times (thankfully police took that a little more seriously!), threatened, sworn at, rammed into, and once waited for in the car park at 10pm when the store closed. I’ve seen security footage for far worse.

Advice for your DS : don’t try and be the hero. Many people who shoplift now bring a weapon ‘just in case’ and if confronted will panic. There’s no way to safely detain an uncooperative shoplifter and if you do, they’ll have far more of a claim against you than the store has against them. His safety is 1000% more important than the store losing a few hundred quid, and ultimately these things can escalate really fast, very unpredictably.

Staff are told not to confront shoplifters for their own safety which is 100% fair imo.

@Bodonkagosh I’m sorry that you experienced all that when you were just trying to do your job.

@Snorlaxosome people do get caught shoplifting sometimes though and go to court so if staff can’t confront them how do they get caught? I have seen in our local paper people going to court over just £50 worth of stuff which seems at odds with what DS has seen with people walking out with full trolleys

In short...they aren't.

We get shoplifted around 10 times a day on a busy day (food retail, you could say they're 'bagging some joy') but if we call the police they dismiss it as low value or peer down the high st and say "well if they come back, ring us again"

If we report internally on shop systems I'm not sure what is supposed to happen next, because nothing ever changes and we don't get any help/advice. Day in, day out, the same people come and help themselves and we simply don't have the staff or time to report every incident when nothing ever seems to come of it. These days we just report the aggressive ones and even then, it was only when the sixth member of staff was threatened/pushed/spat at by the same guy that the police actually did anything about it.

Last year a video went viral on tiktok in a convenience store close to me because the staff member was standing holding her bodycam making sure it was recoding a shoplifter filling her bags with sweets. Staff member was given a warning by the company for potentially provoking the situation even though she didnt actually say anything. There was locals kicking off with police online asking why they weren't doing more. Their response was most petty thefts are not reported so they cant do anything about what they dont know. The shop in question then reported every case of shoplifting to the police to be told if a pub was to report so much crime steps would be taken to close it down 😐