The town centre and South Norwood are once again bracketed in areas where anti-social behaviour – and shoplifting – is ‘most acute’, as bakery chain opts to make its goods more secure in-store
Theft-proof: Greggs have decided that having their stores laid out as ‘help yourself’ for thieves is no longer good business practice
Greggs, the high street bakery and sandwich chain, has finally taken the decision not to invite shoplifters to help themselves, and is to place products behind the counters and secure cabinets, including at the branch in West Croydon.
Greggs axed its “help yourself self-service” approach in South Norwood last year, and it is now to (sausage) roll-out a similar approach at its shop in West Croydon, as well as Peckham, Whitechapel and Upton Park, in Birmingham and Wilford in Nottinghamshire.
It has become almost commonplace for law-abiding Greggs customers to stand open-mouthed at the counter as they pay for their lunchtime meal deal as someone walked in off the street to scoop up an armful of jam doughnuts and scarper, with counter staff watching on, barely registering a shrug.
Occasionally, a member of staff might push an alarm button, which raised no alarm. But even when there are uniformed security guards on the door, they would rarely intervene over the latest nicked BLT sandwich.
Greggs has said previously it was trialling the measure at stores which are “exposed to higher levels of anti-social behaviour”. The latest move will see Greggs replace open cabinets with secure counters in the shops where it says anti-social behaviour is “most acute”.
The use of language is perhaps indicative of the previous approach: shoplifting has been reduced from “crime” to “anti-social behaviour”.
The latest announcement follows on from the measures introduced at South Norwood and elsewhere last year, but is only being trialled at a handful of Greggs’ 2,600 bakeries.
In 2024, shoplifting offences recorded by the police rose by 20% to 516,971, according the Office for National Statistics. But the number of thefts recorded by retailers was 20.4million, up by 3.7million year-on-year, according to the British Retail Consortium, suggesting that many crimes were going unreported to the police, reflecting the zero-action approach to shoplifting witnessed in Greggs and many other high street retailers.
According to yesterday’s announcement, the company is also piloting software that shares incident data directly with local police stations to speed up reporting and response. Again, something which suggests that the company’s previous business practice was not to bother, in the knowledge that the police would rarely attend, never mind investigate.
Government ministers have announced an extra 3,000 neighbourhood police officers and removed the informal threshold that limited prosecutions for thefts under £200.
Of the move, Greggs said: “This is one of a number of initiatives we are trialling across a very small number of shops which are exposed to higher levels of anti-social behaviour.”
It added that the trials were targeted and temporary while the impact on theft and customer experience is assessed.
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