In Nottinghamshire and around the UK, shop theft is becoming a daily occurrence.
Deepak Sharma who owns Beeston Essentials said:
‘People come with one or two, try to confuse you for whatever reason, and with a little bit of distraction, they just pick up whatever.
‘This is their nature, like second nature. They’ll grab something before you even know, and then later on when you see the camera, you realize. Even in that case, the customers standing behind told me, “I didn’t realize.”
And Deepak says he’s often powerless to do anything about it.
New figures from the British Retail Consortium show that nationally there were almost 17 million incidents last year compared to around 3 million in 2017. It cost retailers nearly 1.8 billion pounds.
The nature of these thefts has really changed, so they’ve become a lot more threatening, a lot more aggressive.
He added: ‘There are gangs of people coming in and just taking these huge bags and just sort of like swiping goods into the bags. It’s very scary for people working in the stores.’
