A SHOPPER says she is fed up with her grocer after a security breach stopped her – and made her feel like a criminal.
Susan Dennison was trying to leave after buying some things at her nearby supermarket, a Fortinos owned by Loblaw, when trouble began.
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The wheels of her shopping cart suddenly locked as she pulled into the parking lot of the store – located in Burlington, Ontario, about an hour southwest of Toronto, Canada – causing her to come to an abrupt stop.
A Fortinos employee rushed to find Dennison, she said, and rudely asked to see her receipt.
“It was exasperating. I felt like I had been ambushed,” Dennison told Canadian public broadcaster reporters. complete blood count.
Taken by surprise, Dennison struggled to find the small piece of paper.
Read more about retail theft
“She’s badgering me, like, ‘Is it in your wallet? Is it in her pocket?’” she said.
The shopper soon found the receipt, satisfying the concerns of the employee, who could then unlock her cart and let her go home.
“I realized I was being treated like a thief,” she said.
The entire experience was traumatizing.
“It seemed that [it took] forever, with people passing by. It was humiliating,” Dennison recalled.
She later discovered that cart locking can occur automatically to deter suspicious shoppers as part of the store’s anti-theft strategy.
It seems that Dennison simply got unlucky and got a flawed cart.
“Your methods need to catch thieves, not honest customers,” she said.
Dennison won’t be returning to a Fortinos anytime soon, she added.
FAST BUYERS
Dennison is not the only consumer to complain about the wave of new anti-theft measures implemented by retailers in recent years.
Many customers have criticized the need to enlist the help of employees to retrieve even low-cost, everyday items that are now locked behind plexiglass in some stores like Target.
Other shoppers questioned the growing prevalence of receipt checking, especially at big-box stores like Walmart that employ the strategy along with self-checkout machines.
Some consumers have stated that excessive interference with the shopping experience has made them change retailers and, at times, even feel like criminals.
DON’T KNOW WHO TO BLAME
But retail leaders point the finger at organized retail crime, which they say has begun to seriously affect companies’ bottom lines.
Loblaw — Canada’s largest food retailer and parent company of Fortinos, where Dennison was detained — has repeatedly said that organized theft led to increased security measures.
“This increase in organized retail crime continues to be a significant problem for the retail sector,” said Loblaw CFO Richard Dufresne during a late 2023 conference call.
“These are sophisticated organizations that increasingly use violent tactics and complex networks to steal and sell stolen goods for profit.”
Anti-theft measures implemented by retailers
Retailers in the US and Canada have implemented strategies designed to combat theft. The US Sun has compiled a list of measures that have been implemented in stores.
- Lock items in cabinets.
- Safety stakes.
- Security cameras.
- Signs warning about the impact of theft.
- Receipt scanners.
- Receipt checks.
- Carts with locking technology
However, the company did not provide concrete data to support this claim, according to CBC.
Other retail experts have made similar statements about a phantom increase in retail theft, including the US National Retail Federation.
The NRF published a widely publicized study in April 2023 that concluded that organized retail crime was responsible for nearly half of the estimated $94.5 billion that retailers lost due to “shrinkage,” or loss of product, in 2021 .
But less than a year later, the organization withdrew the study, claiming it used flawed data that led to a gross exaggeration of the impact of organized crime on retail profits.
The initial flawed report “led to a wildly inflated number that was circulating in the press,” Trevor Wagener, researcher and chief economist at the Computer & Communications Industry Association, told CBC.
Putting a number on the cost of organized crime is complicated, Wagener said.
“Generally, you won’t have evidence of a retailer looking at your security footage,” he said Wagener.
“You may have a video showing two or three individuals collecting merchandise and leaving without paying for it. Now, was this subsistence shoplifting…or was it part of an organized crime effort?”
Representatives for Loblaw did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The US Sun.
This story originally appeared on The-sun.com read the full story
