John Lewis and Watrose have said “greed not need” is driving record levels of shoplifting as the group rolls out hosts of new measures to clamp down on surging retail crime.
The John Lewis Partnership has been upgrading its CCTV systems, installing more public display monitors near high-value product aisles, such as alcohol and meat and locking trolleys if people do not pay.
John Lewis Partnership director of central operations and security Lucy Brown told the Financial Times, “Shoplifting and retail crime have been a growing problem across the industry . . . we wanted to see what was the cumulative effect of doing more than one thing,”
“There’s a depressing narrative around cost of living and that shoplifting is because of that. I’m not seeing that. I describe it as absolutely greed, not need. There are lots of people, they shoplift for as many hours in the week as I work, which is a lot. It’s basically their occupation.”
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“The monitors act like mirrors and “they show what we can see”, Brown added.
“Bluntly, people don’t like to see themselves steal. If you went to a shop in the ’80s and ’90s, they often [had] mirrors — and we still deploy mirrors in certain areas because they show stuff like ‘quiet corners’ — but they absolutely work in terms of deterring people from shoplifting.”
“You get organised gangs . . . They will strip the shelves . . . They’re doing that for resale. You then get prolific offenders, who are described as having chaotic lives, and they are generally stealing to feed their own addiction or they are stealing to swap something to feed that addiction.”
Last year, shoplifting in England and Wales reached the highest level since records began in 2003, with more than 430,000 offences recorded in 2023, data from the Office for National Statistics revealed.
Last October, John Lewis chair Dame Sharon White said it was “not an exaggeration” to describe the current wave of shoplifting as an epidemic.
Speaking at a Policy Exchange think tank she said: “It feels like in the last year we have moved from putting an extra six eggs in the shopping basket you haven’t paid for to organised gangs shoplifting to order in a way I find profoundly shocking.”
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