The Decibel - Canadian retail’s security crackdown on violent theft

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

When we think of shoplifting, we often picture teens getting caught at the mall stealing lip gloss, or people bypassing the scanner at the grocery self-checkout. But in recent years, retail theft has gotten more serious, and much more organized.Stores are facing an uptick in targeted, large-scale stealing, with a growing number becoming violent.Globe retailing reporter, Susan Krashinsky Robertson, explains how much this increase is costing Canadian businesses, what police and retailers are doing about it, and why some people have complicated feelings around this kind of crime. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

When we think of people stealing from stores, we might think of someone pocketing nail polish or not scanning all their groceries at the self-checkout. But these days, retailers are dealing with a different kind of theft. Stores are facing more incidents of targeted, large-scale stealing, with an increasing number of them becoming violent. Globe Retailing reporter Susan Krishinski-Robertson is here to explain why we're seeing this uptick, what police and retailers are doing about it, and why some people have complicated feelings around this kind of crime.

I'm Maynika Ramen-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. I'm Meenika Raman-Wilms and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Susan, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. So how big of a problem is retail theft in Canada? It's a pretty big problem and it's growing. So the Retail Council of Canada estimates that this has grown to now a $9.1 billion problem in Canada annually. And just to put that in perspective, overall retail sales in Canada are a little over $600

billion annually. So if you think about that, it's actually a pretty big chunk of retailers' business that's being affected by this problem. And it has grown. So even just back in 2018, the same organization was estimating that this was about a $5 billion a year problem. So you can see that jump from $5 billion to $9 billion in just about six years.

That's a pretty massive increase in thefts that retailers are dealing with. And so when we say retail theft, that basically includes anything that is stolen from a store, is that right? Yeah, that's right. Everything from your one-off incidents of shoplifting, someone taking something and maybe not scanning it

at a self-checkout, to much larger thefts, which can encompass thousands or tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise in one shot. And we should say, retailers, they don't like shoplifting. But for the most part, the retailers that we are hearing from, they're raising the alarm bells not about these one-off incidents, but about the increase that they're seeing in large-scale thefts that

are coordinated, sometimes carried out by groups of people, and often they say backed by organized crime groups. OK, so let's talk about more of what we're seeing now, which is large-scale organized thefts. What does this actually look like, Susan? Yeah, this can look like a group of people walking into a store and literally sweeping product off the shelves and running out. Sometimes this looks like thieves entering a store and employing what are known as booster

bags or booster skirts. And these are bags or garments that are lined with tin foil to defeat the security sensor towers that you see at the entrances to stores. And the problem with these thefts to order, as they've been called by retail executives I've spoken with, is that these thieves are motivated. And in some cases, they are willing to be violent. And this isn't just a problem in Canada, we should say.

In the US, the National Retail Federation did a survey and found that in 2023, 67% of retailers reported an increase in aggression and violence in their stores. And that's something where companies are becoming really alarmed, because they are seeing, in some cases, these thefts turn violent. OK, so this seems like a big part of the concern then, if we're actually seeing an increase in violence companies are becoming really alarmed because they are seeing in some cases these thefts turn violent.

Okay, so this seems like a big part of the concern then if we're actually seeing an increase in violence with these incidents. Yeah, it is a big concern. Many retailers say that violence against their workers is at an all-time high. And it's not just in Canada, we should say. In the US, the National Retail Federation reported that in 2023, 67% of the retailers they surveyed reported an increase in aggression and violence

against their staff members. And many retailers say violence against retail workers is at an all-time high. So that's a really big concern. There was one example that an executive gave me of, we've seen people come into stores. And if you're used to seeing those high-end perfume cases, say at a shopper's drug mart or another drug store,

where the higher-priced perfumes are locked up in a glass case, they've seen incidents where someone will come up to the staffer, ask them to unlock the case so that they can retrieve a perfume. And then they're shoving the staffer out of the way and emptying those shelves. And so that staffer has then been shoved or in some cases hit or worse in progress of that theft. Wow. Yeah. So you mentioned perfume there. I guess what kind of stores or what kind of

merchandise are usually targeted in this kind of incident? Yeah, I was really surprised to learn that this is just across the board. So you might think of these large scale thefts targeting things like electronics or high priced perfumes, like I mentioned before, or other high priced items, the kind of things that in the old days you might have thought of the stereotype of someone selling off the back of a truck, right?

But the reality now is that this really runs the gamut of every kind of product you can imagine. Retailers have seen wheels of cheese stolen, they've seen Nicorette packs, they've seen butter. Butter has hit the headlines a number of times in recent months. These large-scale butter thefts meet in some cases. The types of merchandise that thieves are targeting are no longer just your LCD TVs or your high-end products. They're really across the board. And so where are these stolen goods ending up?

Like, once these individuals have taken a ton of butter, like, what are they doing with that? Yeah, they are storing them sometimes in warehouses or other storage facilities and reselling them, in many cases, on online platforms, where you think of your Amazons or your Facebook marketplaces. Those are places where law enforcement told me they've seen

these stolen goods up for sale. There's a great example of this, actually. In 2022, there was an investigation called Project Kingfisher, which was carried out by police in Halton and some surrounding regions in Ontario. And they actually traced about $2 million worth of stolen products to a single organized group who kept the items in storage lockers and a warehouse and resold them online.

So this is the kind of thing we're seeing. In many cases, the people carrying out these thefts are doing it, I mentioned the term theft to order before, they're doing it at the instruction of these organized groups who then gather these items, resell them at a massive profit, and make a lot of money off of these resales. I guess I wonder, how are they able to do that

and sell this stuff on a site like Amazon? Like aren't there rules against that? Absolutely, there are rules and the platforms say that they work to combat this. So when I asked Amazon about this, they told me that they have detection systems in place to try to catch fraud in progress and try to catch stolen goods. And in some cases, platforms like Amazon will actually refer sellers to law enforcement, say, hey, we think these goods are hot and you should look into this. And that has in some cases resulted in arrests. But there is the reality that some products

are still slipping through the cracks. I guess the big question, Susan, is do we know what's behind this rise? So it sounded like, you know, in the last few years, we have seen a real rise in this kind of organized retail theft. Why is this happening now? Part of it is technology. So that ability to resell things much faster and online, as opposed to trying to find other avenues

to get these to buyers, the ability to look like something is legitimate and sell it to someone who may not even know that they're buying something illegitimate. You know, I mentioned that stereotype of buying off the back of a truck. If you ever did that, you probably knew that you weren't buying something legitimate. But it can be really hard if you're shopping online to detect something that is stolen. One deputy chief of police that I spoke with told me that he's actually had to warn members

of his own family who will show him deals online, say, hey, look at this great price. And he has to tell them, oh, no, that's actually probably stolen. And so there's a lack of detection in some cases on the part of consumers and the ability to resell it. And there is a real friction in retail with stores attempting to set up these sort of welcoming spaces. They don't want every single thing locked up behind glass. And so there has been a rise in incidents partly because criminals are able to go in, they're able to get this stuff off the shelf and get out and resell it. And so as much as you try to combat it, there is that problem. The

other thing that is happening is that there aren't always consequences for doing this. Retailers told me that in some cases they've seen suspects arrested for thefts where they've been apprehended in the store, released on bail, and coming right back in to re-offend. And so there are concerns as well about whether there is adequate oversight of these crimes or adequate punishment for these crimes. Yeah. Of course we are in a high inflationary period where people are really feeling squeezed by the cost of living. So this idea of people looking online for deals, I would imagine that's more prevalent in this time as well. Yeah, I think so.

And the reality is that retailers know that because of that, there's also not a whole lot of public sympathy for this problem for their companies. People are hurting right now. They are squeezed. We are living through an affordability crisis. And so people are really looking for any way to find goods at lower prices. And it's even extended to, you know, in some cases when you look online on social media, you know, people making posts basically saying, you know, if you see someone shoplifting in a store,

no, you didn't, you know, look the other way. And that is a sentiment that is out there because people are really struggling and are responding to this in some cases with a large amount of anger toward retailers. And so the affordability crisis, the massive increase in inflation we've seen in recent years, definitely plays into the problem, or at least the lack of concern among the public about that problem.

What retailers told me, though, is that even if people are not as concerned about the financial losses for Canadian companies that are resulting from these thefts, that one thing that they should realize is that this is also a problem of increasing violence in public spaces, which is what stores are. They are public spaces. And so if the idea is a store is becoming a less safe place

to work for workers who may not have other employment opportunities, if it's becoming a less safe place to take your kids and go shopping, that should be a concern for everybody. And I spoke with one retail executive who told me, they're hearing from store managers who are afraid to come into work. They're worried about their safety

when they go to do their job every day, and that is a problem. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Susan, do we know how these incidents are affecting retailers? What have they said about this issue? Yeah, it is affecting them. I spoke with an executive at La Blah who said that this is now a problem that amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars for that company every year.

And they've seen apprehensions, so people being apprehended for suspected theft in their stores, they've seen that more than double in just the last two years. And it's not only large retailers like La Blah. We have to remember that a large number of retailers in Canada are actually small businesses who are in their own way struggling with increasing costs and affordability and struggling in some cases to get by. I spoke with an owner of a home hardware. Home hardware is a large company,

but its store owners are franchisees, they're small business owners. I spoke with one owner of a home hardware who agreed to talk to me about the general problem of increasing theft. And in between the time that we emailed each other to arrange a phone call, and when I got on the phone with him, his store had been hit.

So he had actually experienced a large scale theft. In this case, it had happened while the store was closed in the early morning hours. They cleaned him out of thousands of dollars worth of tools. They broke his window. He was facing tens of thousands of dollars worth of repairs and coming investments in beefing up his security systems.

And this happened just before the holidays, a time when retailers really count on increasing their sales and making quite a large amount of their money for the year. And instead, this one small business owner was facing a huge level of cost and was not even sure he was going to report it to his insurance company, which is a common problem. He was worried about his premiums going up, and so he said to me, we might just have to eat this. And that's actually more common than you think. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business did a survey last year and found that concerns about higher insurance premiums

was by far the most common reason why businesses that they spoke to don't file insurance claims to deal with community safety issues. So 82% of people they spoke to cited that as an issue for non-reporting. Yeah, that's an additional thing that the small business then has to take on. We talked a little bit about the impact on employees, Susan, but I want to come back to this point because it does sound like these are the frontline workers there who are actually

really going to see the results of this. Do we know how this has impacted people who work at these stores that are being hit? Yeah, it does have a large impact. And in some cases, executives told me they've seen people leave the industry because they just don't want to deal with this problem anymore but not everybody has that option. You know a lot of retail workers tend to be students, a lot of younger people. A lot of these workers are new Canadians you know sometimes working their first job in Canada. They may be single parents trying to feed

their families and they don't have a plethora of other employment options. All right so Susan what is being done to address this continued rise in retail theft? Like have police had any success in curbing this? So there have been a couple of initiatives. In Manitoba last year the province launched a retail theft initiative with funding for overtime hours, actually, for police to increase their presence, particularly in neighborhoods in Winnipeg, to address violent crime. And last fall, the province decided

to make that retail theft initiative a permanent program. But a police officer I spoke to also told me that those kinds of initiatives just aren't always an option, that they are struggling to put boots on the ground to deal with all kinds of crime and they don't always have the resources to increase their presence around retail stores, for example. In the absence of that, in some cases, retailers are looking at really rising costs to deal with retail theft. Save on Foods, which is a grocer owned by Paterson Food Group, they started an in-house

security guard program in 2019 to combat rising incidents of theft and the company now employs more than 300 security guards. Another retailer I heard from, London Drugs, in Vancouver alone, they went from having very few security guards in stores just five years ago to having a team of roughly 200 guards now. So that alone shows you that's a real increase in spending for these retailers to try to beef up security in their stores. Yeah so the retailers themselves are actually kind of taking the initiative to try to combat this. So we talked about security guards, but what kind of other things are they doing to kind of curb these thefts? Yeah, they're spending on all kinds of solutions and I

actually spoke to some of the companies that provide those solutions. So you know there's a company in Quebec that makes the steel gates, you know those turnstiles that you might pass through on your way into a superstore for example, the retail gates. They've seen a huge increase in demand for their product. And their product is also changing. So they saw incidents where, in some cases, thieves would simply toss merchandise over top of those gates.

And so they've been fielding requests for plexiglass extensions to make those gates taller to avoid that problem. They're also looking at building gates with posts that have cameras embedded in them to capture better security footage of thefts in progress. So there are already many surveillance cameras often in retail stores, but they're often up high. And so this company that builds the gates is looking at, you know, should we be putting cameras at face level to sort of capture these things in progress? Speaking of cameras, there is a company that builds security cameras and the body-worn cameras that many police forces around the world use. They've now launched a product for

use specifically by retailers, a body-worn camera for use by security guards in retail stores. And Loblaw is actually testing out the use of those body-worn cameras for use by security guards in retail stores. And Loblaw is actually testing out the use of those body-worn cameras in four of its locations right now, and will evaluate that pilot project to see if it's worth potentially investing in more of those in its stores. As I said before, it is a point of tension in a way, right?

Because again, retailers want to sort of create these environments that are welcoming and sort of conducive to shopping. And so they're looking at trying to beef up their security initiatives without, say, locking everything up or making the store feel like an unwelcoming place. And that's a really tricky balance for them to strike. Yeah.

I imagine you want to protect your stores and your stuff, but you want customers to still, as you say, feel welcome and feel like they have the ability to move around and to shop. So do we know how this increase in retail thefts actually affects customers at that level? One way that it can affect customers, actually, is that if retailers are seeing enough money lost

or enough increases of spending to deal with this problem, that is something that could potentially be felt at the store shelf level in the form of rising prices. It can affect that. Another way, though, is not only the concern that customers may find themselves in the way of one of these thefts accidentally, but also retailers have seen examples where customers have attempted to intervene in one of these thefts accidentally. But also, retailers have seen examples where customers have attempted to intervene in one of these thefts in progress. And that's actually something that concerns them quite a bit,

because in some cases, these can turn violent. They're quite worried that customers might be subjected to violence themselves. It's actually interesting. Many retailers have their own no-intervention policies for their own staff. So they might authorize say trained security personnel to intervene in a theft, but a cashier is expected not to.

And that's a hands off policy or a no intervention policy. So if you're ever in a store and you see a theft in progress and you don't see staff go running after the thief, that might be a reason why. Because these retailers are so concerned about the safety of their staff that they've just said, let them walk out. Wow. So I guess just lastly here, Susan,

we've talked about kind of all these different facets of this issue. But what would retailers want to see, really, to kind of combat this? I think that's a complex question. And there's no simple answer to this. You know, I heard from some retailers that they would like to see the justice system take this more seriously, treat organized retail theft as its own type of crime and prosecute it

more aggressively, but many businesses also realize that this is not simply a law enforcement issue. This isn't only a question of more police on our streets, more aggressive prosecutions. Business owners recognize that this can't just be addressed through law enforcement. A 2023 survey that I found quite illuminating from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, they spoke with more than 2,000 business owners,

and they found that 83% of them agreed that provincial governments should prioritize action on poverty reduction, on affordable housing, and on mental health issues. And so even the business owners who are affected by this understand that theft is not a simple matter of catching bad guys. Theft, like many crimes, is a societal issue that has complex causes and requires equally complex solutions. Susan, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. Thank you.

That's it for today. I'm Maynika Ramon-Wilms. Our producers are Madeleine White, Michal Stein, and Ali Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.