There has been an up­surge in thefts and vi­o­lent rob­beries at su­per­mar­kets forc­ing busi­ness own­ers to spend large sums not on­ly for se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems but al­so to im­ple­ment ad­di­tion­al mea­sures to safe­guard their staff, said Pres­i­dent of the Su­per­mar­ket As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (SATT) Ra­jiv Diptee.

“Every­one is try­ing to see how they can in­crease their ef­forts not just by ramp­ing-up se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems, which not on­ly in­clude phys­i­cal as­pects like in­fra­struc­ture but al­so the se­cu­ri­ty of em­ploy­ees is crit­i­cal be­cause they are al­so be­ing tar­get­ed.

“For in­stance, it could be a store man­ag­er who crim­i­nals may tar­get to get ac­cess in­to the store, or cer­tain con­tents of the store, and we have seen a cou­ple of in­stances of that with­in our net­work,” Diptee ex­plained.

He said su­per­mar­kets are al­so ad­vised to con­duct fre­quent vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty as­sess­ments of their op­er­a­tions, usu­al­ly in tan­dem with se­cu­ri­ty ex­perts which is an­oth­er huge ex­pense.

Cou­pled with this, are in­creas­es in pil­fer­age with thieves tar­get­ing both high-end and ba­sic food items which al­so eat away at prof­its.

About a year ago, Diptee spoke about thefts at su­per­mar­kets, but from then to now he said the sit­u­a­tion has wors­ened, adding that it is not on­ly be­cause peo­ple are des­per­ate for some­thing to eat.

“The steal­ing is now more ram­pant and peo­ple are al­lud­ing to this as eco­nom­ic dif­fi­cul­ty, but this is not al­ways the case. Peo­ple are tar­get­ing the high-val­ue items and not nec­es­sar­i­ly the ba­sics and that is in­dica­tive they want to make a quick sale on the out­side.

“This has be­come so oner­ous that some own­ers are keep­ing more of these items locked away,” Diptee said, not­ing that for any busi­ness se­cu­ri­ty is one of the top three costs which is be­com­ing in­creas­ing­ly ex­pen­sive to main­tain.

Say­ing his mem­bers are frus­trat­ed, Diptee called on the po­lice to do more to nab per­pe­tra­tors and bring them to jus­tice, em­pha­sis­ing that crime con­tin­ues to eat away at prof­its.

Ac­cord­ing to the SATT pres­i­dent, there is al­so a lot more gang ac­tiv­i­ty pri­mar­i­ly in­volv­ing youths who al­so tar­get su­per­mar­kets.

“That is very alarm­ing be­cause they can find jobs but in­stead they are get­ting in­volved in crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ties,” Diptee added.

While the larg­er stores can af­ford to fork out more for se­cu­ri­ty, this is not the case for small­er com­mu­ni­ty es­tab­lish­ments whose fi­nances are lim­it­ed.

“We have no­ticed the small­er stores are un­der se­ri­ous threat be­cause they are the ones be­ing tar­get­ed when you see these in­ci­dents of vi­o­lent armed rob­beries tak­ing place.

“When ban­dits come in­to a store, they pull out guns, they jump the counter, they take every­thing from the reg­is­ter and as a re­sult, you have more anx­i­ety in the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty,” Diptee said.

To as­sist, the as­so­ci­a­tion has al­so been tak­ing its own proac­tive ap­proach in­clud­ing us­ing dis­cre­tion in in­stances where peo­ple gen­uine­ly find it hard to make ends meet.

“There’s a lot of pil­fer­age which goes un­re­port­ed but I might get a phone call and some as­sis­tance would be ren­dered to the per­son giv­en their eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stance which forced them to steal in the first in­stance,” Diptee ex­plained.

He list­ed ba­sic food items like cheese, flour, oil, sug­ar and mar­garine as be­ing pop­u­lar choic­es for shoplifters.

The high­er-end items like ba­by for­mu­la, cof­fee, al­co­hol and ghee are grabbed to be sold on the out­side, Diptee added.

“Cheese is now con­sid­ered a high­er-end item be­cause it has got­ten re­al­ly ex­pen­sive and when these things are stolen it rep­re­sents a hit that the small­er stores just can­not af­ford,” he said.

He added thieves still find in­no­v­a­tive ways to tote away goods like break­ing the seal off cer­tain prod­ucts like oil and pour­ing some in­to a chub­by bot­tle or tear­ing a pack of flour and emp­ty­ing some in­to a bag.

In some cas­es, there are re­peat of­fend­ers.

“We al­so have in­ter­nal net­works where we iden­ti­fy re­peat of­fend­ers and stores are put on alert. We al­so share this in­for­ma­tion with the com­mu­ni­ty po­lice so they are al­so on the look­out for per­sons of in­ter­est who have a his­to­ry of steal­ing,” Diptee added.

Price Club Di­rec­tor Shamshad Ali al­so told the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian that from his ob­ser­va­tion, su­per­mar­ket thieves move in well-or­gan­ised rings.

“It is not a one-off thing. They are or­gan­ised in this crime. They come in packs of four and five. They come in the store not to­geth­er but they would work to­geth­er and they have cre­ative ways of shoplift­ing like hid­ing items in their cloth­ings and un­der­gar­ments,”

Ali said, not­ing that bread and ghee are among the pop­u­lar items stolen and the lat­ter is “still be­ing pil­fered quite heav­i­ly.”

“You would be shocked that these large tins of ghee where they find places to hide it on their body,” Ali added.

Agree­ing that se­cu­ri­ty is in­creas­ing due to crime he said es­tab­lish­ments can on­ly ab­sorb this up to a point.

“Every cost in any busi­ness will be re­flect­ed in the price that is of­fered to the con­sumer. You can ab­sorb your prices up to a point but how much can you ab­sorb?” Ali said.

Ali said that at Price Club, which is lo­cat­ed in Ch­agua­nas, there is a com­pli­ment of 25 se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cers, CCTV cam­eras, as well as 24-hour mon­i­tor­ing among oth­er fea­tures.

“It is not as sim­ple as putting a guard by the door,” Ali not­ed.

Holis­tic ap­proach need­ed

A cou­ple of weeks ago, SATT was part of dis­cus­sions in­volv­ing near­ly every cham­ber in the coun­try.

Diptee said so fed-up are busi­ness­es by the crime surge that they are clos­ing their doors ear­li­er.

“Every­body is ac­knowl­edg­ing this sit­u­a­tion does not af­fect just su­per­mar­kets. Some peo­ple are clos­ing their stores be­fore it gets dark.

“This as­pect of crime has cre­at­ed a poor­er en­vi­ron­ment for the busi­ness own­er be­cause they don’t want to stay open to be­come a tar­get. And I mean by 5, 6 pm they look­ing to close,” Diptee said.

About three weeks ago, while speak­ing in the Sen­ate, Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Fitzger­ald Hinds as­sured that the po­lice are mak­ing ef­forts to tack­le shoplift­ing at su­per­mar­kets.

He out­lined these as in­clud­ing in­creased stop-and-search mea­sures in and around busi­ness ar­eas which in­clude su­per­mar­kets.

“These pa­trols are man­dat­ed to make pub­lic spaces a fo­cal point, in­clu­sive of busi­ness dis­tricts on their pa­trol routes, and some op­er­a­tions have been in­ten­si­fied to tar­get par­tic­u­lar ve­hi­cle types and pro­lif­ic of­fend­ers that are known to the po­lice for en­gag­ing in that kind of crim­i­nal ac­tiv­i­ty,” Hinds ex­plained.

While this is wel­comed, Diptee wants a more proac­tive polic­ing ap­proach, not­ing that the re­sponse times by law en­force­ment are “some­times very lim­it­ed.”

How­ev­er, Diptee said it’s not al­ways the fault of the po­lice.

“In their de­fence they tell us they don’t have enough ve­hi­cles or man­pow­er so it’s re­al­ly left up to us to se­cure our premis­es,” Diptee said.

But he wel­comed Hinds’ state­ments, say­ing he re­mained “op­ti­mistic.”

“It means that while we are de­vel­op­ing a stronger re­la­tion­ship with the po­lice ser­vice, they will al­so de­vel­op a stronger re­la­tion­ship with us,” Diptee said.

Some su­per­mar­kets, how­ev­er, have lost faith that crime can be abat­ed and have cho­sen to in­stead to per­ma­nent­ly close.

In March this year Woo Ling Gro­cery, one of the old­est busi­ness­es in St James closed down.

The su­per­mar­ket, which is lo­cat­ed along the West­ern Main Road, in the vicin­i­ty of Agra Street, has been in op­er­a­tion for over 60 years.

It was be­ing run by Brent Woo Ling, his 83-year-old fa­ther and his 80-year-old un­cle.