- British grocery chain Waitrose is offering free coffees to cops under a plan to deter shoplifters.
- A police car outside the store can make people rethink shoplifting, the chain's parent company said.
A British grocery chain is offering free coffee to on-duty police officers in an attempt to deter shoplifters.
Waitrose, an upmarket grocer with more than 300 stores, has begun offering uniformed officers free hot drinks from its coffee machines and will ask them to bring a reusable cup.
Sister company John Lewis, a department store with more than 30 locations, lets uniformed officers use its staff seating areas and bathrooms as well as its subsidized staff canteens, where police can get free hot drinks alongside discounted hot meals for £3 or less (around $3.80 or less), The Times of London reported.
Parent company John Lewis Partnership said in a press release shared with Insider that the initiative was "part of efforts to strengthen relationships and tackle retail crime."
"Even just having a police car parked outside can make people think twice about shoplifting from our branches, or becoming aggressive towards our Partners," Nicki Juniper, John Lewis Partnership's head of security, said in a statement.
John Lewis Partnership said it had already increased the number of guards and staff who have been trained to stop and detain offenders, improved CCTV, and offered body-worn cameras to staff. It's trialing increasing the number of security, warning customers that CCTV is in use and that shoplifters face jail time. Waitrose has also trained staff in "love-bombing," described as being extra attentive to customers, including asking if they needed help at self-service checkouts, to deter theft.
"However, while many of these efforts have been effective in stopping individual shoplifters, retailers are increasingly dealing with groups and organised crime, which can only be tackled with wider support," John Lewis Partnership said in the press release.
The number of assaults on employees at Waitrose stores has roughly doubled since 2020, The Times reported. This rise was driven by "professional shoplifters stealing for greed," Juniper told The Times.
Collectively, British retailers recorded on average more than 850 incidents of violence and abuse against workers a day in the year to March 31, 2022, including racial and sexual abuse, physical assault, and threats with weapons, a survey by the British Retail Consortium found.
The BRC said that though this was slightly down on the previous year's figures, it was almost double the rate prior to the pandemic, and represented 105 incidents per 1,000 store workers. Significantly fewer incidents were reported to police than the prior year, which the BRC said was "largely due to lack of confidence in any police response."
The BRC found that in the year to March 31, 2022, retailers lost £1.04 billion, or $1.32 billion, to retail crime, including £953 million to customer theft, and spent around £722 million on crime prevention.
Separate data from police forces in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland analyzed by BBC News showed nearly 33,000 recorded incidents of shoplifting in March, a jump of nearly a third compared to March 2022.
Other retailers have attempted to crack down on retail crime by locking up products in boxes, adding more security cameras, and trialing new store formats with more security measures, such as products secured behind counters.