Jumbo CEO Ton van Veen says shoplifters becoming more ‘sophisticated’ as losses from shoplifting exceed profits

Retail chain Jumbo is bracing to take a €100 million ($110 million) hit from shoplifting last year, exceeding an expected profit of around €80 million ($88 million), the group said Wednesday during its earnings release, NL Times reported via news agency ANP. 

That represents about 1% of the chain’s turnover for 2023, in what chief executive Ton van Veen described as “not a healthy situation.”

He called for politicians to address a swelling tide of shoplifting that is gripping major supermarkets amid a cost of living crisis and technological changes at checkouts.

Van Veen said his supermarket planned to up the presence of security guards at its 725 stores while increasing the use of camera surveillance.  

“We often catch people not scanning products, or not paying at the cash register,” van Veen told ANP.

“People are becoming increasingly sophisticated in not paying for products. You sometimes fall over in shock to witness how creative people are to take products without paying.”

The group’s CEO elaborated that most thefts go undetected, with a majority happening at its self-scanning checkout machines. He said the most stolen items included raw chicken breasts, meat, fish, toothpaste, and cosmetic products.

The chain reported a 7.3% rise in revenues to €11 billion ($12 billion) last year, per ANP.

The Dutch boss isn’t alone in his struggle. In November, consultancy Retail Economics found U.K. retailers were likely to lose £7.9 billion ($10 billion) from theft over the previous 12 months, meanwhile, CapitalOne Shopping estimates that U.S. stores lost $112 billion to shoplifting in 2023. 

The phenomenon has gotten so intense that Walmart built a police department substation in one of its stores in the low-income Atlanta neighborhood of Vine City as city officials tried to mitigate crime.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk also threw in his two cents in 2023 when he said America was going “full Joker” amid rising cases of shoplifting.

In September, Target said rampant theft had forced the U.S. retail giant to shutter nine stores across the country after increased security failed to address the issue.

A middle-class crime

Major retailers have been sounding the alarm bells on a trend of shoplifting over the past few years—and their calls for help have only got louder over the past 12 months as inflation continues to fuel a cost of living crisis.

According to the chairman of one of the U.K.’s biggest chains, the trend has become something of a white-collar crime.

Archie Norman of Marks & Spencer said the middle class was responsible for a significant portion of theft in the company’s stores, as they willingly ignore items that fail to scan and take them anyway.   

Speaking to ANP, Jumbo CEO van Veen said stores in certain parts of the Netherlands and Belgium endured higher rates of shoplifting, but didn’t elaborate on the economic context of those locations.

However, not everyone is sympathetic to the apparent plight of retail giants which turn over billions in sales every year.

Many point out that retailers have been happy to scrimp on labor costs by replacing checkout employees with self-service machines without adequately staffing other areas to protect their products.

Indeed, the CEO of Dutch supermarket group Ahold Delhaize told Fortune that self-checkout was here to stay at his stores because the savings on labor costs outweighed the downsides from theft.

Other companies are doing away with self-checkout machines altogether.

However, one of the company’s doing so, U.K. upmarket retailer Booths, said it was doing so to improve the experience of its customers.