Crime doesn’t care about shop size – so why does the crackdown?
As new technology tackles big shop theft, Epos Now CEO and Founder calls on retail giants to harness their collective power to help small businesses access the same protection.
By Jacyn Heavens, Founder & CEO, Epos Now
The British Retail Consortium has estimated that shop theft is costing retailers £400 million a year - and of course it’s good news that the Met has recently joined forces with major retailers to tackle the issue using crime reporting technology.
The bad news is that, due to the costs involved, small and medium businesses are still being left to fend for themselves, when they’re more likely to suffer irreversible damage that could shut their doors for good.
Progress against retail crime can't stop with the biggest names getting the biggest tools. Small and medium-sized businesses employ 16.9 million people - 60% of the UK's private-sector workforce - and they're the pubs, cafés, restaurants and independent retailers where people come together to shop, eat, celebrate and connect. They deserve the same fighting chance as everyone else.
The Met's new crime-reporting technology has quadrupled the enforcement rate for shoplifting in big London retailers and evidence that used to take 28 days to process now moves in minutes.
But, that kind of protection is overwhelmingly built for, and available to, the businesses that already have the most resources to deal with loss. The corner shop, the independent café, the family-run pub down the road - they don't have a loss prevention team, a data science department, or the buying power to negotiate an enterprise security contract. Too often, they're left to simply absorb theft as a cost of doing business at a time when their margins are already stretched thinner than they've ever been.
That's not right, and it's not sustainable. I've said before that our tax system too often favours online giants over the high street. The same imbalance shows up in loss prevention - the businesses with the least room to lose money are usually the last to get the tools that stop them losing it.
In 2023, around ten of the UK’s largest retail chains funded Project Pegasus, pooling roughly £600,000 to fund a highly successful facial-recognition and CCTV-sharing scheme aimed at identifying prolific and organised shoplifters. I urge the UK’s retail giants once again harness their collective powers, pool their resources and help to make loss prevention technology available to smaller businesses.
This is where I think technology has a real job to do, too - and it's exactly what we've built Epos Now to deliver. Every transaction that runs through a till already contains the answers a business owner needs. Real-time stock tracking flags discrepancies as they happen, and allows business owners to see which lines are disappearing faster than they're selling and to identify the hours when unexplained voids spike. Staff-level logins ensure that every action on the till is accountable to a person, not a shared password and that loss patterns are reported before they become habit. Our POS integrate with the cameras and security systems already on site, so that the data and the footage tell the same story.
An independent retailer, a two-site café group or a local pub all deserve the same visibility across their business that a large national chain has, without needing a national chain's security budget to get it. Because loss prevention isn't only about protecting margin, important as that is. It's about protecting people - the shopworkers on the receiving end of nearly 1,600 incidents a day, and the owners who've put everything they have into their businesses.
We work closely with over 100,000 merchants and we know that the smallest dent caused by theft or fraud could be fatal to their future. That’s why we'll keep investing in loss prevention tools that help our customers protect what they've built. Small businesses are a crucial part of our economy, and we must collectively keep on pushing for affordable, integrated loss protection for the businesses at the heart of our high streets.
–ENDS–
