Britain Facing An ‘Epidemic’ Of Shoplifting: John Lewis Boss (image-www.pixabay.com)
Britain is seeing an “epidemic” of shoplifting, the boss of retailer John Lewis said on Tuesday in an interview with BBC radio.
She also added that this kind of low-level retail crime is a problem on multiple levels and now the situations shows that it may go out of control.
“Across the sector, it”s about £1 billion” (€860,000), Sharon White, chair of the John Lewis Partnership that owns department stores and Waitrose supermarkets said of the retail industry”s losses to shoplifting.
On Monday, White called the UK government to set up a commission and examine the problem as soon as possible as the retail dependent town centres are becoming “a looting ground for emboldened shoplifters and organised gangs”.
“One of the reasons the current debate is so important is that those incidents haven”t always been responded to by the police. And sometimes some of those incidents have got violent aspects,” White pointed out.
On Tuesday, George Weston, the CEO of Primark-owner Associated British Food, said they have stepped up equipping the stores with security guards and CCTV cameras and also to equip the staffs with body-cameras to combat in store theft.
“But we need to emphasise, as others have emphasised, the role of the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and magistrates in tackling this problem which is just getting steadily worse,” he told Reuters in an interview.
According to the data published by the British Retail Consortium earlier this year, retail theft across ten of the UK”s largest cities has risen by 27% overall, as per Euronews report.
Earlier in summer, similar incident took place in which dozens of young people who were apparently galvanised by a TikTok trend gathered to loot and vandalise stores in London’s Oxford Street.The shops were closed at peak hours and the police had to arrive in large numbers to disperse the crowd and to arrest the troublemakers.
The British consumers seems already in trouble with the burdensome interest rates and high prices. Now the shoplifting has become an add on risk to their staff as well as revenue.
Tesco CEO, Murphy has called for a change in the law to make abuse and violence towards retail workers a specific offence in Britain.Target (TGT.N), Foot Locker (FL. N) and Dick’s Sporting Goods (DKS.N) have all warned that profits have been under pressure from loss of inventory due to theft at their stores, Reuters reported.
