Shrinkage is when a store has fewer items in stock than appear in its inventory system. In the U. CEO Doug McMillon warned in December that the retailer will close stores if theft does not slow. Dozens of employees blamed self-checkouts for the increasing thefts and urged the retailer to cut back its reliance on the machines.

Walmart Canada declined to answer questions about how much the retailer has seen shoplifting increase in recent years and whether self-checkouts pose additional risks of theft.

Retailers and advocates are at odds as to why both shoplifting and prices are climbing. On the one hand, retailers warn that consumers will have to pay for the price of increasing theft. But advocates say there is little evidence to support the argument that shoplifting is having a sizable impact on retailer profits.

Determining how much inventory goes missing due to theft is also difficult to establish. Retail industry analyst Lisa Hutcheson said shrinkage typically accounts for one to two per cent of sales, and this can be a result of several reasons, including administrative errors.

For retailers, the solution is to increase security and co-ordination with authorities to prevent theft. But food security advocates say government and policies need to address why a growing number of people might be driven to steal in the first place.

At last count, Food insecurity is only expected to grow with increasing prices, said Tim Li, a research program co-ordinator at PROOF at the University of Toronto, which studies food insecurity in Canada. He stressed that while he does not condone crime, the issue might not be so black and white.

Ghada Alsharif is a Toronto-based business reporter for the Star. Reach Ghada via email: galsharif torstar. Submitting this form below will send a message to your email with a link to change your password. An email message containing instructions on how to reset your password has been sent to the email address listed on your account.

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Ramon Ferreira Toronto Star Photo Illustration. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp LinkedIn SMS Email Print Copy article link Save. Paige Taylor White. Facebook Twitter WhatsApp LinkedIn SMS Email. Tony has been shoplifting most of his food and he feels no guilt. Already a Subscriber?

Sign in. You are logged in. Switch accounts. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW. You might be interested in. Dec 31, Take our survey. Self-checkouts, said Tony, presented such an opportunity. Less staff also means less surveillance on store floors. Related Stories. Forget it. How one Toronto condo building found a solution for the rising cost of food.

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Pierre Poilievre claims 40 offenders were arrested 6, times in Vancouver in a year. Is that actually true? Ellie Tesher: I thought I was good friends with two guys in high school. Years later, I learned something that made me question that. Ask Ellie. Provincial Politics. Are you one of them?

GET THIS OFFER. com, each property of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited, 8 Spadina Avenue, 10th Floor, Toronto, ON M5V 0S8. Terms of Use Privacy Policy Advertising Terms Accessibility. Back ×. Sorry , an error occurred. Get Started. Back × Sign Up. Using imprecise, but ominous, language that tells little but raises anxieties and elicits an emotional response—one pliable to police calls for tougher laws and bail conditions.

An online search suggests that if they did not originate the term, the Vancouver Police Department has played a big part in promoting it.

Yet there has been no such freak out, and certainly no calls for criminalization, over the much greater thefts being perpetrated by grocery companies—what they are doing is not even viewed as crime. All of this shoplifting panic, complete with images of poor women in grocery stores, gives off a feeling summed up succinctly in the 17th Century folk poem, that goes:.

The poem speaks directly to the fact that capitalist law has always existed to protect capitalist enclosers and exploiters and to punish working class people simply trying to survive.

The real grocery store theft is being perpetrated by grocery companies. It takes the form of exploitation of their workers, price gouging of customers, and in some cases outright criminality. A glance at the grocery industry in Canada shows the extent of the swindle—and how much is taken by a few prolific offenders.

The numbers are striking for Loblaws, the company that owns the Superstore, where the Nanaimo police campaign originated. In their reported financial results for the second quarter ended June 17, , Loblaw showed still another quarter of massive financial gains marked by increased sales.

Net earnings were up The Food Retail section Loblaw same-stores sales increased by 6. And make no mistake, this is an industry that is highly monopolized in Canada. Five retailers—Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, Costco and Walmart—control fully 75 percent of the food retail market in Canada.

Remember too that they also dominate processing, where the Canadian market is even more concentrated in some sectors.

Only two corporations control 80 percent of the bread-making market, —One of those was owned by Loblaw parent company George Weston Ltd until very recently. Perfect conditions for price gouging and benefiting through inflationary pricing.

RBC has concluded that even if inflation slows, they do not expect food prices to return to pre-pandemic levels. So, who is robbing who? Do not forget either that these are explicitly criminal enterprises though we oppose capital on principle whether legal or not.

Low and behold, which was one of the main companies involved in the criminal endeavor? Senior officers of Canada Bread and Weston Foods sibling company to Loblaws under parent George Weston Limited colluded to boost bread prices and even leaned on retailers to increase their prices.

Canada Bread eventually received a fine, but no company owners or executives faced the jail time that some shoplifters face. Yet these outfits are benefiting from policing campaigns, carried compliantly by copaganda media sources, to protect their profits against extremely poor people.

Many businesses took the opportunity of the COVID shutdowns and government aid money during it to restructure their stores. Part of this was increased automation and the introduction or expansion of automated check outs that get customers to do work for free.

Part of this seems to be taking some of the savings and putting it into hiring more, low paid, private security. Rendering working class shoppers as suspects simply for shopping. And this poses additional, serious threats to working class people, especially poor, racialized, and Indigenous people.

In , video circulated of a FreshCo security guard, Cameron McMillan, beating and detaining an Indigenous woman, Annette Custer, over a perceived shoplifting of a single beef roast.

While the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations called for McMillan to be charged immediately following the assault, Custer was the only one ever taken to court. The mercenaries who protect the ones who steal the common from under the goose are also protected by colonial injustice systems.

This violence is not new—Indigenous and Black shoppers are too familiar with it. It is another expression of colonial violence, surveillance, and racial profiling that mark capitalist spatial control.

This violence is, more often than is acknowledged, lethal. In alone at least three people were killed by security guards, two in Metro Vancouver. Bentley was eventually charged with manslaughter and robbery, an outcome that is rare when it comes to formal police who kill.

Private security is largely unregulated in Canada and security guards have great leeway to act in unaccountable and largely unreported ways.

They act in public space as well even though they have no special mandate to do so. Their actions should be observed and challenged. Some have taken to Cop Watch-like counter-patrols of security guards and private security. Spring has recently covered one such effort, the strike by 3, workers at Metro Grocery Stores that shut down 27 stores across the Greater Toronto Area.

The workers are unionized with Unifor Local Strikes show most forcefully how workers can contest the greatest grocery store theft—the theft of the value produced by workers, surplus value, in the form of profit.

It was not caused by workers having too many jobs and making too much money. It's been caused by profit taking — not just by supermarkets, but by powerful companies at every step of the supply chain.

Other ideas, such as free legal defense have also emerged. Activist lawyers might well develop legal corps to do this. Perhaps unions could orient toward funding legal defenses as an expression of working-class solidarity. The same bosses that want to send security and cops after poor people are the ones who want to bust unions and break strikes.

The self-reduction of prices involved a collective refusal to comply with price increases, especially for necessities in goods and services.

These were not minor actions and at their peak, thousands of families reportedly took part. Over the course of years, the practice spread to tackle rent payments, electricity and home heating costs, and public transportation.

Autonomist Marxist theorist Bruno Ramirez writes of the collective character of self-reduction actions as self-reduction committees were created in many neighborhoods, in small towns as well as city centers.

An important note in thinking about this practice is that establishing these committees was assisted by the prior existence of neighborhood committees that had long been active in community struggles.

These are all examples of what I refer to as infrastructures of resistance—resources, relations, and venues that sustain struggles over time and allow for strategic and tactical innovation in the ebb and flow of struggle. There are some instructive examples of the self-reduction of prices in Canada, and not that long ago in the past.

On December 3, , the Centre-Sud Unemployed Committee in Montreal, organized a mass action in which a hundred unemployed people swept into the restaurant at the Queen Elizabeth hotel, confiscated the buffet, and shared the food with people on the sidewalk outside.

Virtually nothing is physically stopping people from stealing “lot items” from retail locations. Here are few things that deter or prevent theft big.kim › major-grocery-store-chain-closes-shoplifting-crime Two Save A Lot locations in the Kansas City area shut down because rampant shoplifting and theft made it financially impossible for the discount

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Bargain grocery steals - 9 Most Popular Items People Steal from Grocery Stores ; 1. Meat. Natalia Lisovskaya/Adobe Black Angus Prime meat steaks ; 2. Makeup. ronstik/Adobe Assorted makeup Virtually nothing is physically stopping people from stealing “lot items” from retail locations. Here are few things that deter or prevent theft big.kim › major-grocery-store-chain-closes-shoplifting-crime Two Save A Lot locations in the Kansas City area shut down because rampant shoplifting and theft made it financially impossible for the discount

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Chris Purple. With high demand comes the potential for shoplifting and reselling. Some grocery stores keep premium cold, flu, and headache medications behind the pharmacy counter to try to prevent as much theft as possible.

Pro tip: Instead of stealing, turn to an old-fashioned way of reducing grocery costs : Clipping coupons. Or try the modern version of coupon clipping by using cash-back apps such as Ibotta. Skin care is big business, so it makes sense that skin care and other personal care items are stolen regularly from grocery stores.

This creates a problem on multiple levels. These products are locked up in grocery stores for a reason. People will happily steal family planning products ranging from condoms to lubricants and gel contraceptives. Not only do people steal them for personal needs, but they are often resold to others looking for a discount.

Grocery stores try to strike a balance between providing shoppers with access to goods and preventing theft. So, the next time you go to the store and see something locked up, be patient with the staff.

Keep calm, carry on, and look for bargains that can reduce the rising cost of groceries. More from FinanceBuzz:. You will receive emails from FinanceBuzz. Unsubscribe at any time.

Privacy Policy. Don't see the email? Let us know. As food prices continue to rise, everyone is hoping for relief. This one seems surprising. Honestly, who would try to grab a few T-bone steaks for free? This one is a little sad.

Baby formula is an extremely popular item to steal. Since seafood is perishable, it might seem odd that people steal it from grocery stores.

Reselling on the black market to restaurants can be a common activity.