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A third of surveyed British shoppers shoplift when using self-service tills Thursday, 26th April 2012
Photo credit: Birmingham Mail
A third of British consumers have admitted stealing from supermarket self-service tills.
Shoppers have been selecting cheaper fruit and vegetables whilst weighing goods and selecting “small” when prompted to enter the size of items.
Bolder shoplifters have admitted to placing items into plastic bags without paying for them and simply walking out of the store. More accomplished thieves have admitted to more complicated methods, like tampering with the scales.
The figures, which were gathered from a survey of almost 5,000 customers on watchmywallet.co.uk, showed that 30 per cent of shoppers have stolen from self-service tills.
58 per cent of those surveyed said they considered cheating the self-service tills as stealing and would never do it.
A spokesman for watchmywallet.co.uk said: “Checkouts are calibrated to detect when an unpaid for item makes it into the bagging area, giving rise to the now famous phrase 'unexpected item in the bagging area'.
“But staff regularly override the checkout in order to keep the queues flowing.
“One checkout supervisor recently landed her employer in hot water when she overrode the till to allow a seven-year-old girl to purchase wine for her mother.
“Without proper supervision, small items such as packets can easily be slipped into a bag unnoticed and passed off by the customer as an honest mistake, if challenged.
“While our poll revealed disagreement over the ethics of cheating the checkout, there seems to be a much stronger consensus when it comes to the user experience - most admit to having lost their tempers.”
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Posted in Consumers, Food, Legal, Retail Industry Tagged Retail & Consumer Industry, Food, Asda, Morrisons, Tesco, Sainsbury's, Waitrose, John Lewis, my, retail, media, news, Consumer, Legal, Retail Industry, E-Commerce
