City stores have highest theft rates in country
... AND THERE ARE NEVER ANY POLICE AROUND SAYS CHAIN MANAGER
TWO supermarkets in Coventry have the highest theft rates of any of the food chain’s 240 stores nationwide.
The manager of the Heron Foods store in Walsgrave Road, Ball Hill, says they and their colleagues in Radford have it worse than any of the business’s other shops in the UK.
Staff often have to deal with shoplifters themselves as they have no security guards and are coming up against ever-more organised groups of criminals.
Some thieves are even stashing frozen ducks and turkeys in to secret pockets lining their clothes in preparation for the festive period.
Guy Young, store manager at Heron Foods in Walsgrave Road, said: “Theft is always an issue in shops such as ours, but this shop in particular is very hard hit.
“There are in fact around 240 stores in the company and our store, and the one in Radford, have the highest theft rates of all of them.
“We don’t have a security guard and there’s no real police presence on a regular basis.
“We’ve had one PCSO walk past in the last four months. The police do say to report thefts, but it is very arduous when we are working with these levels of theft.
“We do report crimes internally and we are hoping to get a security guard soon.
“We are also barring people from the store but they are still coming back in.”
The most popular items with shoplifters at the Ball Hill store are cheese and coffee, although the thought of what to have for Christmas dinner seems to have sparked them in to changing their ways.
“The thefts are often done by organised syndicates,” explained Guy. “We recently had a group of women coming in with sewn-up skirts or big dresses with pockets inside.
“And they are literally walking out the door with lots of frozen ducks inside their clothes.
“It got that bad that we stopped a group of them leaving the store and ended up putting a banning order on the lot of them.”
While the theft of small items such as cheese may seem trivial, Guy revealed it can eventually have drastic consequences.
He said: “We have people stealing, but it is also about trying to stop people from buying it as well.
“They come in here and grab blocks of cheese and go and sell it door-to-door.
“We want to encourage people on the doors not to buy it as it has a knock-on effect which can even lead to store closures.”