Cape Town - While the annual national crime statistics released by the SAPS showed a continuing downward trend in shoplifting over the last decade, three police stations in the Cape Town area recorded an increase in incidents.
Shoplifting came down from a national high of 88568 reported incidents in the 2009/2010 period to 60167 in the 2018/2019 reporting phase. The Durban Central police station reported the most shoplifting with 1024 instances, followed by Johannesburg Central with 896, Park Road in Bloemfontein with 778 and Cape Town Central with 766.
In the Cape Town area, Table View, Paarl and Claremont police stations recorded 45.3%, 16% and 6.9% increases in shoplifting respectively while police stations such as Cape Town Central, Mitchells Plain and Bellville recorded drops of 27.8%, 15.1% and 7.8% each.
As to what drives many incidents of shoplifting, Anine Kriegler of the UCT Centre for Criminology said: “Is there a relationship between drugs and shoplifting? Yes that is very likely. Some people who use drugs struggle for various reasons to maintain stable, legitimate incomes and therefore are forced to engage in crime to survive.
“There is also likely to be a relationship between shoplifting and tobacco, alcohol, food, designer shoes, and so on.”
As the crime stats did not break down the items that are most commonly shoplifted, crime and retailing experts filled in the blanks. Small items that can be easily concealed and which further down the line can be easily resold through informal markets are called “hot products” and these are the most targeted by shoplifters.
“The Consumer Goods Council of SA (CGCSA) cannot quantify the cost of shoplifting as these incidents are not collated on a national level from our members.
“What we can confirm, however, is that shoplifting represents a significant percentage of shrinkage in retail outlets which inevitably affects their bottom line,” said Abraham Nelson, Executive, Crime Risk Initiative of the CGCSA.
Vincent Lanz, a retailing expert from Neo Retailing Solutions, said: “Traditionally items such as razor blades, women’s creams and condoms have been the most shoplifted items in supermarkets, and this has led to many retailers taking the items away from the supermarket aisles to the cigarette kiosks which are ordinarily set some distance from the tills, to prevent shoplifting thefts.”
Lanz said moving these items out of the aisles to the cigarette kiosks had been a double-edged sword for many retailers.
“It has led to a drop in sales of such items as healthcare, beauty products, hygiene, medicine, sexual health and some associated brands, and this has also been followed by the shopkeepers further slashing the variety of stocks they hold,” he said.