The in­crease in food prices cou­pled with the es­ca­lat­ing cost in the stan­dard of liv­ing are be­ing blamed for a sig­nif­i­cant rise in shoplift­ing at su­per­mar­kets across the coun­try, says pres­i­dent of the Su­per­mar­kets As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T Ra­jiv Diptee.

From slip­ping ba­by for­mu­la un­der cloth­ing to emp­ty­ing cook­ing oil in emp­ty wa­ter bot­tles, Diptee ex­plained to the Busi­ness Guardian that these are just a few in a slew of items which are be­ing lift­ed off the shelves of gro­cery stores.

“It’s any and every item that peo­ple are steal­ing and once it can fit in their cloth­ing or where ever else, they stick it in there and sim­ply walk way.

“And if the item is too large to cart way, they ‘break it down’ to steal it,” Diptee added.

And the sit­u­a­tion has be­come so oner­ous that su­per­mar­ket own­ers have been forced to fork out sig­nif­i­cant sums to beef-up se­cu­ri­ty in­clud­ing in­vest­ing in ad­di­tion­al sur­veil­lance equip­ment and hir­ing more se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers.

“As peo­ple have be­come poor­er, we have been see­ing that the very vul­ner­a­ble have been shift­ing to a life of crime and that is some­thing that needs to be tak­en in­to ac­count stem­ming from this re­ces­sion or de­pres­sion tak­ing place in the coun­try,” Diptee said.

He not­ed that there have been in­stances where ba­sic items like a loaf of bread is stolen, which some­times ren­ders sym­pa­thy from su­per­mar­ket own­ers.

But this is not the case for all.

“Where we try to help, we help, but we can­not help every one,” Diptee added.

He said while theft oc­cur al­most “every oth­er day” many how­ev­er, go un­re­port­ed as the process--from start to fin­ish--in bring­ing per­pe­tra­tors to jus­tice is of­ten lengthy.

“If, for in­stance, a man steals a bot­tle of cof­fee, I have to take the time to file the re­port, then I have to go to court for how­ev­er long etc. So does that re­al­ly make sense for a bot­tle of cof­fee? That’s why a lot of this goes un­re­port­ed,” Diptee said.

How­ev­er, he not­ed that busi­ness­es have de­vel­oped their own sys­tems and net­work­ing in deal­ing with this scourge.

Pho­tos de­rived from CCTV cap­tur­ing pil­fer­ers are cir­cu­lat­ed among the var­i­ous es­tab­lish­ments, alert­ing own­ers to be on the look out for would-be thieves, Diptee said.

But he not­ed that as in­ci­dents in­crease so too has the fear.

“You see in these sin­gle-type run gro­ceries where peo­ple come in with guns and take every thing from the draw. Every one is now liv­ing with this kind of fear,” Diptee added.

Echo­ing sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments Ver­non Per­sad of Per­sad’s D Food King who told Busi­ness Guardian that thieves have be­come more brazen, op­er­at­ing in well-or­gan­ised gangs.

“Up to Sat­ur­day we have seen a very strange group of peo­ple who are go­ing around. So you now have a lot of pro­fes­sion­al shoplift­ing tak­ing place,” Per­sad added.

He added they are tar­get­ing “high val­ue goods” like ghee, olive oil, pow­ered milk, pow­ered laun­dry de­ter­gent and ba­by for­mu­la to re­sell “on the out­side” at a cheap­er rate ei­ther on the streets or in their re­spec­tive com­mu­ni­ties.

“They are not steal­ing a chub­by or a pack of ping pong. It’s any item that can fetch a high price. A tin of ba­by milk is more than $100 so if they steal six of those it’s about a $1,000 and they could eas­i­ly re­sell it for about $500 be­cause there is a mar­ket for it,” Per­sad ex­plained.

He al­so agreed this has re­sult­ed in fur­ther se­cu­ri­ty costs which are then un­for­tu­nate­ly, passed on to the cus­tomers.

“In ad­di­tion to cam­eras you now have to get se­cu­ri­ty to walk your lanes. When you go to any su­per­mar­ket you are see­ing the num­ber of se­cu­ri­ty guards that they now have,” Per­sad said, adding that he too has been spend­ing a “sig­nif­i­cant amount” to pro­tect his goods.

He cit­ed that se­cu­ri­ty is the third or in some cas­es the sec­ond high­est cost for su­per­mar­kets.

The num­ber one, he said, is usu­al­ly salaries fol­lowed by util­i­ty ex­pen­di­ture.

And while ad­mit­ting pil­fer­ing has al­ways been oc­cur­ring, Per­sad al­so agreed with Diptee that as the econ­o­my gets tougher so too has the fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion of many which has been con­tribut­ing to steal­ing at su­per­mar­kets.

“Some don’t have a job, some don’t have reg­u­lar num­ber of work­ing hours and their cost of liv­ing keeps go­ing up. It is un­der­stood that peo­ple have to live but in ad­di­tion to needs where peo­ple would have shoplift­ed due to im­pov­er­ished sit­u­a­tions, there is now a com­bi­na­tion of those be­ing poor and those who are pro­fes­sion­al thieves. Those who see this as a lu­cra­tive trade,” Per­sad fur­ther ex­plained.

Some of these “pro­fes­sion­als” he added are of­ten “all decked off in all span­dex” and move in groups, plac­ing them­selves at strate­gic lo­ca­tions through­out the su­per­mar­ket.

“Some will block the cam­eras with their backs with the oth­ers will put the items in cloth­ing and move out the store. We have a mon­i­tor­ing cen­tre which was able to pick this up and alert us,” Per­sad said.

On re­port­ing to the po­lice, he said of­fi­cers are “bom­bard­ed” by re­ports al­so not­ing that catch­ing thieves re­main chal­leng­ing on dif­fer­ent lev­els.

‘There’s the whole el­e­ment of proof, then there’s iden­ti­fy­ing the per­sons, then there’s iden­ti­fy­ing the item, there’s the is­sue of the cam­era footage and ad­mis­si­bil­i­ty of that in court. So all this have its con­straints,” Per­sad said.

He al­so ex­pressed con­cerned that the sit­u­a­tion could wors­en giv­en in­creased gas prices which could fur­ther pro­pel some peo­ple in­to fur­ther im­pov­er­ish­ment.

Massy Stores, how­ev­er, said it has not no­ticed a “marked in­crease” in pil­fer­ing.

David Af­fon­so, ex­ec­u­tive chair­man of the Massy Group’s In­te­grat­ed Re­tail Busi­ness Unit who spoke to the Busi­ness Guardian at the re­cent open­ing of its Brent­wood lo­ca­tion, said Massy con­tin­ues to be guard against thieves.

“It is cer­tain­ly a cost we don’t need, but by and large there’s an el­e­ment of that, but it’s very few and we have a num­ber of mea­sures in place in terms of se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems like cam­eras and the phys­i­cal pres­ence of both uni­form and non-uni­form se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers in the store to pick this up pret­ty quick­ly,” Af­fon­so ex­plained.

While he em­pha­sised that Massy has not no­ticed any sig­nif­i­cant in­creas­es in pil­fer­ing Af­fon­so said one can un­der­stand that it “could be­come sig­nif­i­cant” as things get tighter.