Supermarket chain Sainsbury’s has announced that it will make a change to its self checkout tills, as part of efforts to reduce shoplifting in stores.
Shoppers who haven’t scanned their items properly will be shown VAR-style replays of their actions before leaving the store.
The camera sits above the till itself, tracking the scanning and packing actions of the customer. If any item is bagged without scanning, a video of the process will be shown to shoppers.
The clip will be accompanied by the message: “Looks like that last item didn’t scan. Please check you scanned it correctly before continuing.”
The method appears to be targeting shoplifters who might pay for some items, but also leave the store with more items than they’ve scanned and paid for.
This comes after reports that shoplifting in the capital and around the country are on the rise.
With offences increasing by 54 per cent last year, the latest ONS statistics show that almost 90,000 shoplifting offences were recorded in the capital in 2024, up from roughly 58,000 the previous year.
That echoes a wider trend across the UK, as shoplifting offences in England and Wales reached an all-time high in 2024, with 516,971 offences recorded. That’s a 20% increase compared to the previous year.
"We regularly review the security measures in our stores and our decisions to implement them are based on a range of factors, including offering our customers a smooth checkout experience,” a Sainsbury’s spokeswoman told The Sun.
Self-service checkouts have become increasingly prevalent in retail across the country, including supermarkets like Sainsbury’s.
As well as self-scanning tills, self-scan systems such as Sainsbury’s SmartShop or Tesco’s Scan As You Shop, where shoppers scan items as they go using a handheld device or smartphone app, are also on the rise.
After Christmas 2024, Sainsbury’s told the Guardian that 30% of the groceries it sold over the peak festive period were processed via SmartShop, leading to “cost savings and higher speed of checkout”.
This lack of human oversight in the checkout process has seemingly left the gap for shoplifting that shops now hope to plug using these cameras.
