Global Courant
WELLINGTON – A man walks out of a New Zealand supermarket with bags filled with nine stolen legs of lamb. Another pushes out a shopping cart loaded with NZ$1,500 (S$1,221) of stolen corned beef and mayonnaise. Another hits a guard in the face with a bottle of milk before making off with a basket of goods.
No one tries to cover up their theft.
The men, seen in security footage released last month by Foodstuffs North Island, part of the country’s largest supermarket chain, are emblematic of the escalating wave of retail crime sweeping the country and neighboring Australia.
The theft is brazen, organised, increasingly violent and costs the two countries combined an estimated A$10 billion (S$8.76 billion) a year, retail groups said.
Experts say the incidents underline the hardships many people face as the costs of everyday items rise.
With consumers under pressure, organized criminals are finding a market of buyers for stolen food and other household items, says Mr Phil Thomson, CEO and co-founder of retail crime intelligence platform Auror, which operates in New Zealand, Australia , North America. America and Great Britain.
“The majority of thefts that occur are from people who do this as their full-time job,” he said. “About 10 percent of people are responsible for about 60 percent of crime. And it’s all profit driven. They steal to order, and they steal it to resell.”
New Zealand and Australia aren’t the only ones experiencing a rise in retail crime: in the US, ‘flash robs’ involving gangs of thieves have targeted luxury shopping centers in California, while in Britain organized criminal gangs are stealing valuable items, raising theft there to a record high.
The data for its Southern Hemisphere neighbors, however, is grim. Shoplifting and shoplifting in New Zealand increased by 45 per cent in 2022 compared to 2021, according to figures released by police this month, including theft reported directly to them and through Auror.
According to government data released earlier this month, retail theft rose 47.5 percent year-on-year in June in New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state.
With the cost of stolen goods rising, many Antipodean businesses are overhauling their security, especially in the area of self-service checkouts that make it easier to smuggle unpaid items out of stores.
Technological solutions are proving popular, such as sensors on roofs, automatic gates at self-checkouts and even trials of facial recognition software.
Other measures include posts to prevent ram raids. And while the changes aren’t as dramatic as the armed guards stationed outside stores in the US or knockoff products in Britain, they do represent a substantial shift for retailers in countries where laptops can often be left unattended on cafe tables without fear of theft. .
“These are not things we should be doing in a cost-of-living crisis,” said Chris Quin, CEO of Foodstuffs North Island, where crime at the chain’s 320 stores rose by 59 in the three months to July percent has increased compared to July. to the same period last year. “We should all be concerned with ‘how do we get food prices lower?’”
