Theft in supermarkets: everything you need to know and how to avoid it?

Theft is the most detrimental act for a business. Each year, theft accounts for three quarters of the shrinkage in stores. A new solution has been created to fight against this plague.

Let’s have a look at why you are experiencing theft, how to catch your thieves and how to eliminate theft .
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Some statistics on thefts in supermarkets

• Shrinkage represents 3% of the total annual sales revenue for supermarkets
• Theft accounts for 75%  of the total shrinkage in supermarkets.
• Veesion can reduce theft up to 70%.

Consumers pay the price for each theft

While there is no supporting evidence that the rate of theft is increasing from year to year, it is also not decreasing either. It is a  damaging phenomenon for the stores and leaves some in a  financial deficit. To solve this problem, the distributors recover their losses by increasing the price of their other products being sold to paying customers.

The thieves thus directly impact the purchasing power of your customers. According to a news article in the ladepeche.fr, this represents an average of 148 euros for each household per year. Theft is therefore detrimental to customers in addition to being detrimental to merchants.

Ultimately, fighting against theft means defending the purchasing power of households and your loyal customers!

Theft trends for supermarkets in 2022

It is difficult to know the rate of theft from year to year and therefore to know if it tends to increase, decrease or stagnate. However, what can be detected are the theft techniques and their evolution. For example, without a video surveillance system, it is easy to seize an item and hide it in one's jacket without anyone seeing it. With a video surveillance system this becomes a little more difficult. Nevertheless,  automatic cash registers are becoming more and more present in the stores which create a favorable environment for theft. It is a device that can generate a significant markdown if it is not well implemented and controlled.

With automatic checkouts, it is no longer a store employee who scans the items and therefore makes sure that all the products the customer has taken are paid for. Now it is the customer himself who scans his articles, so it is easy for him to neglect to scan articles and avoid paying for certain more expensive articles.

How to avoid theft in supermarkets

Security guards

The security guard is responsible for ensuring the safety of your store's goods and people. They must welcome, control and monitor the access of people entering the store. Their role is to ensure that there are no incidents within the store and that no theft is committed. Human surveillance is a considerable asset since the security guard will be able to follow and monitor the customers on whom there is a doubt (for example to see if they really pass all the articles they have taken in the store at the cashier desk).

Anti-theft systems and security gates

The installation of anti-theft devices on items will ensure that customers do not take anything without having passed through the checkout. It is a way to avoid fraud within the stores. Anti-theft systems can detect theft that would not have been seen by cameras and security guards. However, if the RFID tag has been ripped off or is surrounded by aluminum it is no longer detectable.

Vidéo surveillance

Video surveillance systems are an additional eye for monitoring the store's aisles. Nothing can escape the recording of the cameras, as long as the cameras are properly oriented.

However, even if everything can be recorded by surveillance cameras, the footage of thefts must still be seen by the store's employees in order to stop the thieves. It is impossible for a person to look at several images at the same time, from several different monitors and to detect suspicious gestures which can be very discreet (here’s 9 key reasons to automate your video surveillance system)

Intelligent video surveillance for supermarkets

Every means of preventing store theft has its flaws; security guards cannot be everywhere at the same time, anti-theft devices can be ripped off, video surveillance requires an employee to be behind the screens all the time to monitor the images.

To remedy these difficulties, Veesion offers you an intelligent video surveillance system. Our solution is grafted onto existing video surveillance systems and then automatically analyzes all the video surveillance images to automatically detect thefts in your store in real time. Veesion acts as an omnipresent security agent and continuously analyzes the video surveillance images to detect a maximum of thefts and suspicious behaviors.