Rise of the self-checkout shoplifteRs

According to the latest shocking figures almost a quarter of customers have committed theft at least once at a self-service till

NAPOLEON famously described Britain as “a nation of shopkeepers”. But following an explosion in the number of self-checkout machines in supermarkets we might better be described as “a nation of shoplifters”. A recent survey by sales website Voucher Codes Pro found that one in four of us admits to bagging at least one item without paying and the total value of thefts via unmanned self-service tills doubled to £3.2billion between 2014 and 2017.

And this week it emerged that Tesco is trialling CCTV on selfservice checkouts in a “small number of stores” in a bid to fight the growing menace. And who can blame them?

Shoppers are growing more cunning in their attempts to get the maximum bang for their buck. A common tactic is to pass off an expensive item as a cheaper one. As they are of a similar weight, potatoes can be substituted for mangoes without triggering the dreaded “unexpected item in the bagging area” announcement.

One woman regularly pays less for Pink Lady apples by selecting the cheaper Braeburn variety when scanning them through.

Bag theft is another growth area. With so many eco-conscious shoppers taking their own carrier bags into supermarkets these days, unless a particularly alert sales assistant has their eye on you, it is simplicity itself to prod “0” rather than “1” and save that all-important 5p.

This particular offence has reached such epidemic proportions in one supermarket in Surbiton, London, that they are now available only on request.

But the modern-day shoplifter is as likely to be a normally blameless member of society as a hard-faced crook, according to Dr Matt Hopkins of the University of Leicester’s department of criminology, who co-authored an influential study into the phenomenon in 2015.

“When people take something from a self-scan checkout it’s like they don’t view it as a real crime,” he says. “These self-checkout machines can be infuriating and if something doesn’t scan properly you can always say: ‘Well I thought I scanned it, it’s the technology that’s the problem.’”

This theory was heartily endorsed by one shopper yesterday: “If something doesn’t scan I’m not going to stand around waiting for one of their sales assistants to take their own sweet time to come over and help I’m just going to nick it.”

Some consumers also feel resentful about taking on a role that was once performed by one of the supermarket’s employees.

“Anyone who pays for more than half of their stuff in selfcheckout is a total moron,” reads one of the more militant comments in a online Reddit discussion on the subject. “There is no moral issue with stealing from a store that forces you to use selfcheckout, period. They are charging you to work at their store.”

This is a sentiment that was picked up by the Leicester study. In their zeal to cut labour costs, it said, supermarkets could be seen as having created “a crime-generating environment” that promotes profit “above social responsibility”.

The most famous practitioner of the check-out cheat’s art is the celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson. His road to Damascus – or should that be Perdition – moment came when he arrived home from the supermarket one day in 2011. “I looked at the bill and thought, ‘God, I’ve got some items here that I haven’t paid for,’” he once recalled. “Do I go back and pay? Hmm, it’s Tesco, they can afford it.”

Emboldened by this accidental heist, Worrall Thompson then started to shoplift for real but it wasn’t long before he was rumbled. His fifth theft amounted to three onions, two packets of coleslaw, a ciabatta, a newspaper and a sandwich. As one interviewer wrote: “He was no Ronnie Biggs.”

BUT the store detectives who ensnared him after installing two extra security cameras called in the police and while he was not charged he was cautioned.

In many ways Worrall Thompson was unlucky as his total haul amounted to £70.68. As part of the Antisocial Behaviour, Crime and Police Act of 2014, anyone who is accused of “low-value shoplifting” can plead guilty by post. Police will not even attend an incident unless violence or a threat of violence against retail staff has occurred. This effective decriminalisation of shoplifting has sparked a boom, with the number of reported offences up from 300,000 in 2012/13 to almost 370,000 last year.

While the supermarket chains can offset a certain amount of what is known in the trade as “external shrinkage” against the savings they are making in staff costs, there are signs they are losing their patience. Tesco’s lead on procuring CCTV cameras seems bound to be followed by its competitors.

But that is unlikely to halt the march of automation. It was Tesco that introduced the first self-checkout machine into a British supermarket as part of a pilot scheme in 2003.

Executives hoped it would make for an easier way to pay while reducing the expense of staff to operate the tills. Six years later self-service tills were rolled out nationally and the number of self-checkouts is predicted to rise from 240,000 worldwide in 2016 to 468,000 by 2021.

Now the race is on to pioneer “human-free” retailing. Homedelivery giant Amazon is introducing stores that use sensors to track the items in a shopper’s trolley and take payment by emailing them a receipt later and charging their account. It will be interesting to see what happens to shoplifting rates then.