Greggs shifts food behind counters to stop thieves

[SerendipityJane]

I'm old enough that my DM was more used to this sort of operation than the new fangled "self service" that appeared in the 60s.

Once again the feeling of travelling backwards in time doesn't seem to quite go away.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c17r52rvj2lo

Also, the no receipt = no refund. As previously, people stole clothes, toys etc. Come back a few days later and expected a refund - ie money they never had in the first place..

They are not stealing because they're hungry. The main shoplifters who think they're above the law have plenty of money.
In the olden days when you'd be sent to prison, mostly the poor stole, now it is teenagers, adults who don't care, or addicts who steal lumps of meat ot baby formula to buy drugs.
Very rarely is it a genuinely desperate hungry person, they've too much to lose.

I help our school PTA. It was sports day last week, so to raise funds, we set up a stand, selling bottles of water to the parents who’d come to watch. 50p per bottle.

the deputy head told the pta committee that she’d seen 2 separate parents take a load of bottles, put them in the bottom of their pushchairs and walk away without paying.

they were literally stealing from their own kids’ school🤷‍♀️

I saw it happening ten years ago in Greggs, so it’s not that new a phenomenon.

The Greggs in West Croydon has security on the doors; obviously it was losing too much even for them.

I saw a lady being stopped from leaving Tesco, As she was removing the items from her clothing I had to watch, chicken fillets, bread rolls, shampoo, bodywash, how on earth would you have the balls. Easily a basket fill. 😆

Yep! A bit of historical perspective is always interesting.

I used to work in London, when smoking was banned on the tube. 1984? A train I was on was stopped for quite a while in central London. Apparently a guy in the next carriage had challenged a guy smoking illegally. He was attacked and then stretchered out. The smoker was politely escorted off by the police.

If people are prepared to break the social contract, they're not very nice.

Greggs pre-tax profit for 2024 was £74 million, up 16% on the previous year. I'm not going to validate theft, but I also think big business plays it's part in the rot of society.

“Becoming a low-trust rather than high-trust society is a terrible development for the UK. And no I don’t think it’s about poverty - it’s about there being zero consequences for this kind of crime and people not giving a shit.”

If we want to talk about things that trickle down, I'd start with trust.

For goodness sake! Greggs made a successful business in the impoverished North East, employs many people, gives people the pleasure of traditional, comforting food and drinks for relatively cheap prices, put 46 million in tax into our economy last year, and gives long term staff bonuses.

Why suggest they cause rot to society and deserve to be stolen from?

Greggs is a PLC with 88% corporate investment ownership, majority holdings being Blackrock, Vanguard and Fiduciary management.

You can Google the ingredients and manufacturing processes at your leisure, but I don't personally find what rolls out of their factories traditional or comforting.

It isn’t relevant whether you or I don’t like Greggs food.

Without knowing the turnover, that’s a meaningless number though. If turnover was £200 million it’s a great result; if turnover was £2 billion it’s poor.

It also appears that in 2025 Greggs paid 10% of its 2024 profit in bonuses to all employees with more than 6 months service, and increased its matched pension contribution to 7% So that seems to me to be the sort of business we should be encouraging surely?

https://employeebenefits.co.uk/pay-strategy/greggs-to-share-205-million-bonus-and-increase-pension-contributions/280448.article#:~:text=All%20employees%20with%20six%20months,contribution%20to%207%25%20in%202025.

Well, Vanguard, among other things offers pensions and other investment, so all of us without government backed final or average salary pension a schemes ought to be pleased that Greggs is performing well :)

But they have 2,600 stores, so the profit "per store" is roughly an average of £28,000 which is hardly excessive.

Would you get in a tizzy over 2,600 private/independent bakers/sandwich shops making only £26,000 each?

In fact, they wouldn't make that much because they'd be paying more for their supplies as they'd be buying from distributors/manufacturers who'd make a profit. Wholesale profits are typically 25%, manufacturing profits are typically 50%.

So, if instead of owning their own stores, if they just did the manufacture and distribution, then each of the private/independent shop fronts would probably only be making £13k each per year.

Hardly excessive when you drill down the figures into numbers of stores, etc. That's the probably with getting excited about "big" numbers without actually dividing down by numbers of stores, numbers of staff, different divisions, etc.

If the thefts weren’t as big, I am guessing that Greggs would be making 10-13% more profit. I heard one Greggs loses £850-1000 a week on thefts. If the average theft was £350 store/week - that’s over £45m gone to theft!

If they decide to get rid of the self serve cabinets and stands, probably need to install self serve order screens like ones in McDs (card only). Still have staff on tills to deal with customers paying cash then get more staff to get orders together.

I started working in 2011 and it was normal even then to ignore shoplifting. Security was basically there to act as a deterrent or to protect staff from angry customers - they had practically no power against shoplifting.

Does anyone remember the thread a while ago where the OP witnessed someone putting something (crisps?) in their bag and being 'challenged' by a member of staff?

People were falling over themselves to point out that if they hadn't left the store then they weren't stealing, that the staff member was all shades of power hungry because they 'challenged' someone on it in front of other people, which would humiliate the individual and that should never happen to a 'customer', how being the 'victim' of that is such poor customer service.

One poster even said that the staff member could be potentially prosecuted for causing 'harm' to the 'customer' by embarrassing/humiliating them.

I think OP reported the staff member said something like "Don't forget to pay for the crisps you have put in your bag too" as the shopper was waiting to pay for other items in their hand or something.

Not to mention the fairly regular threads about sales staff and security guards harassing customers and the responses, that they'd have told them off, put them in their place, complained to management, made a fuss - do they really think that shoplifters haven't used these tactics - being an outraged customer at being accused of shop lifting - to get away with what they were doing? "I did it by accident. How dare you accuse me, a paying customer of theft"

I mean they can't win really can they, shoplifters don't announce themselves and mostly try to disguise and hide what they're doing and blend in, so they can secrete what they're stealing, the dash out the door and violence if caught is usually once they've nicked what they want, meaning that there is going to be an element of people who aren't shop lifting being observed or maybe even challenged - but people become so outraged and after blood when that happens that it's no wonder less people are challenged for it, combined with the risk of injury to the person doing the challenging.

We've kind of created this situation by being so obsessed with 'customer service' and behaving however we want as customers that it supercedes everything and anything else.

We've kind of created this situation by being so obsessed with 'customer service'

I think the preference for "cheap stuff" trumps that.

My son works in a supermarket and he has people come in and walk out with trolley loads of stuff without paying. If £300 is the limit for police intervention that would have to be quite a lot of stuff to steal at once unless the police monitor repeat offenders and wait for them to get to that amount. Even then how would they catch them if security can’t stop them? Would they be able to trace them in any way?

I think they do attempt to keep a running tally for repeat offenders. Or so a cctv notice said in a store.Also something about civil action to reclaim value of goods stolen.

I suspect most prolific shoplifters are skint though , either through drink / drugs or if working in a gsng a lot of money going to the person in control.

I think you’ve got a point. I remember being a bit surprised on the continent the first time I had my shopping bags (from other stores) stapled shut and my handbag cable tied closed. You get really used to it; surprisingly quickly.

If security just treats everyone like a potential thief it’s probably easier to catch the actual ones.

@Tiredofwhatabouterybut how do they catch them after this? Wait for them to come back into store, recognise them and call the police? That seems like a clunky way of doing things, esp if police aren’t available at the time

The friend which I mentioned in pp worked for Sainsburys. A woman stole about £1800 of face creams and she was only got caught when police officers were leaving after obtaining CCTV footage of an assault of a customer on another customer a few days previously.

Remember face creams are small and pricey. A pot of eye cream can be £35.

After that, the store manager said only to put one item per line of anything over £10

@Beon £1800??? omg!! thats nuts

Every time I have seen a shoplifter legging it or got caught by whoever. they wear a dark tracksuit and a baseball cap. Even when reading SM, asking have you seen these SLs, the CCTV stills, they are wearing dark grey tracksuit and black hoodie.

Even when I was at a supermarket when it was 35c when everyone was wearing shorts, t-shirts, summer dresses, the SLs were wearing the dark tracksuits etc.