As I write this I’m approaching the halfway stage of the on-the-road judging for this year’s SLR Awards. It’s a fantastic, if gruelling, opportunity to tour the highways and byways of Scotland visiting literally every store on the shortlist and covering thousands of miles in the process.
It’s always a rewarding month or so and it’s great to see what the sector is up to, speak to dozens of retailers and find out a juicy bit of gossip here and there. Several things have already struck me so far but two things in particular stand out: first, the level of investment in stores is clearly huge once again, which is hugely encouraging. With the world seemingly collapsing around our ears, retailers are still bold enough and farsighted enough to realise that local retailing can’t stand still. The standards so far have been nothing short of exceptional.
The second thing that has struck me, however, is less heartening. Literally every retailer I’ve spoken to has mentioned retail crime, usually without having to be asked. Retail crime has been a plague since we first started publishing SLR almost a quarter of a century ago, but it seems crystal clear that in the last few years it has moved up a gear. There’s lots of theories about why that might be – Covid and the cost of living, for instance – but the reality is that retail crime in all its ugly guises has become pretty much a daily occurrence in just about every store I’ve visited. That’s soul-destroying in itself but what’s worse, in some senses, is the palpable frustration etched on the faces of retailers who simply have no means of effectively combatting it.
Once upon a time, thieves were fly, sleight-of-hand merchants who could slip a can into their pocket unnoticed. These days the thieves are just as likely to fill a bag and brazenly walk out, fully aware they are being watched. So how are we meant to cope with that as a sector? Short of taking the law into our own hands – which is probably inadvisable and certainly risky – there’s not a lot that can practically be done. You certainly can’t rely on a police response.
So, with all this in mind, we’ve decided to start seeking out solutions that retailers can implement in the real world, and we’ll be running a series of articles over the coming months. They’re not going to end retail crime overnight and they may not all have dramatic impacts, but we’ve got to try something, anything. Nothing has really changed in 25 years in the way retail crime is treated so I wouldn’t hold my breath for drastic measures from the government or the police any time soon. We need to unite as a sector and share our ideas for how to tackle crime. It’s that simple.
We kick off in this issue with a fascinating project down south that took an eminently sensible and pragmatic approach to tackling shoplifting – and it worked. And we’ll be presenting more ideas in the future that hopefully you can learn from or be inspired by. And if you have any great ideas yourself that you’ve used, please do let us know so that we can share them with the entire sector in these pages.
Antony Begley, Publishing Director, SLR
Retail crime: let’s face the truth
As I write this I’m approaching the halfway stage of the on-the-road judging for this year’s SLR Awards. It’s a fantastic, if gruelling, opportunity to tour the highways and byways of Scotland visiting literally every store on the shortlist and covering thousands of miles in the process.
It’s always a rewarding month or so and it’s great to see what the sector is up to, speak to dozens of retailers and find out a juicy bit of gossip here and there. Several things have already struck me so far but two things in particular stand out: first, the level of investment in stores is clearly huge once again, which is hugely encouraging. With the world seemingly collapsing around our ears, retailers are still bold enough and farsighted enough to realise that local retailing can’t stand still. The standards so far have been nothing short of exceptional.
The second thing that has struck me, however, is less heartening. Literally every retailer I’ve spoken to has mentioned retail crime, usually without having to be asked. Retail crime has been a plague since we first started publishing SLR almost a quarter of a century ago, but it seems crystal clear that in the last few years it has moved up a gear. There’s lots of theories about why that might be – Covid and the cost of living, for instance – but the reality is that retail crime in all its ugly guises has become pretty much a daily occurrence in just about every store I’ve visited. That’s soul-destroying in itself but what’s worse, in some senses, is the palpable frustration etched on the faces of retailers who simply have no means of effectively combatting it.
Once upon a time, thieves were fly, sleight-of-hand merchants who could slip a can into their pocket unnoticed. These days the thieves are just as likely to fill a bag and brazenly walk out, fully aware they are being watched. So how are we meant to cope with that as a sector? Short of taking the law into our own hands – which is probably inadvisable and certainly risky – there’s not a lot that can practically be done. You certainly can’t rely on a police response.
So, with all this in mind, we’ve decided to start seeking out solutions that retailers can implement in the real world, and we’ll be running a series of articles over the coming months. They’re not going to end retail crime overnight and they may not all have dramatic impacts, but we’ve got to try something, anything. Nothing has really changed in 25 years in the way retail crime is treated so I wouldn’t hold my breath for drastic measures from the government or the police any time soon. We need to unite as a sector and share our ideas for how to tackle crime. It’s that simple.
We kick off in this issue with a fascinating project down south that took an eminently sensible and pragmatic approach to tackling shoplifting – and it worked. And we’ll be presenting more ideas in the future that hopefully you can learn from or be inspired by. And if you have any great ideas yourself that you’ve used, please do let us know so that we can share them with the entire sector in these pages.
Antony Begley, Publishing Director, SLR
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