Is self-service con behind carrot sales boom?
IT would look like Britain’s supermarkets are going through a carrot boom.
With 800million more of them going through the tills than five years ago, it appears we’ve caught the healthy eating bug.
The root of the issue, however, is rather different. In a growing scam at the self-service checkout, customers are cutting the cost of more expensive fruit and veg – by passing them off as carrots.
Swindlers are taking advantage of touchscreens by registering pricey loose items like avocados as carrots – which are one of the least costly items in the aisles by weight.
Another method is to switch labels on preselected products, according to experts.
Emmeline Taylor, a senior lecturer in criminology at City, University of London, said it could explain why 800million more carrots were apparently sold last year than in 2013.
She described how she was working with retailers to reduce shoplifting when one major supermarket discovered it had sold more carrots than it had ever had in stock. ‘Puzzled by this development, it looked into its inventories and found that in some cases customers were apparently purchasing 18kg of carrots in one go,’ she said.
‘Unfortunately, this wasn’t a sudden switch to healthy eating, it was an early sign of a new type of shoplifter.’ She added: ‘Peanuts are cheaper than pine nuts, cooking tomatoes are cheaper than vine tomatoes and, of course, carrots are cheaper by weight than most other fruit and vegetables. Recognising this, many customers switch labels or deliberately input a different item on loose products.’
Dr Taylor told The Times the practice had become so commonplace in Britain that many shoppers have convinced themselves they are not actually committing a crime.
She now uses an acronym for those who commit so- called discount theft – Swipers, which stands for seemingly well-intentioned patrons engaging in routine shoplifting. She has divided Swipers into four categories. Accidental shoppers claim an item wasn’t recorded because they couldn’t get it to scan or didn’t realise it hadn’t registered on the till.
Switchers swap labels or input details of a different, cheaper item on loose products to fool the system. They dismiss it as being not ‘real’ theft as an item has been paid for.
Compensators satisfy their conscience by telling themselves the retailer has already saved money by replacing a worker with a machine. And the frustrated blame the often infuriating experience of using self-service tills for cheating the supermarket.
Introduced in the 1990s as a way to cut costs, there are now about 50,000 self-service tills in Britain. A study last year found about £3.2billion of goods are stolen from them each year – equivalent to about £5 per person a month.
One in four shoppers has admitted stealing an item at a self-scan checkout. Some supermarkets have responded with security measures. Sainsbury’s said in March it was installing CCTV cameras and mirrors at 300 stores.