Shoplifting in the UAE costs a pretty penny

Dubai: At a busy LuLu Hypermarket in Dubai, a male shopper secretly removed the security tag from a pair of jeans. He then put them on and casually walked away.

When he passed through the security gate, the alarm went off. It took a while for the store's security to figure out what triggered the alarm: The man was empty-handed. However, when they searched his pockets, they found the security tag.

"He forgot to throw it away and put it in his pocket instead. I don't know how he did it, but it takes some skills to deactivate or take a security tag off an item," recalls Nando Kumar, corporate communications manager of LuLu Hypermarkets.

In another supermarket, a lady who was shopping with her two children picked some chocolates and vegetables and hid them under her baby pram. The store's security guard had been watching her all along.

When the lady reached the checkout counter and refused to pay for the items, the guard intercepted her. Her excuse: Her husband was out of a job and her kids were asking for chocolates.

From wearing stolen clothes to hiding merchandise, shoplifters devise various ways to steal items from the stores.

Their loot comprises mostly stationary, health and beauty products, razor blades, aftershave, batteries, small electronic items and other goods that come in small packaging that can be easily pocketed.

Owners of major supermarkets and hypermarkets in Dubai are silent about the volume or value of goods they lose each year, but they confirm that shoplifting remains a perennial problem.

However, since many retailers have improved anti-theft measures, and invested heavily in security and surveillance technology to stop the losses, the incidence of pilferage has dropped recently.

At LuLu Hypermarkets, shoplifting has fallen from four cases to about two cases each week per store. The hypermarkets chain operator spends on average Dh200,000 to equip each new hypermarket with security and surveillance systems.

"Spending on security technology has increased by 25 per cent between 2007 and 2008. With the advent of new technology, and with our constant effort to improve our monitoring, pilferage cases have come down," Kumar tells Gulf News.

Most pilfered items at LuLu are from the health and beauty section. Other favourites are flash drives, computer accessories and smaller electronic items from the store's IT section.

Besides the goods inside the store, LuLu also has to deal with shopping carts that frequently end up outside nearby residential apartments.

"We've seen a lot of people taking the carts all the way to their homes. We lose trolleys everyday, so we have a team of 10 to 15 people that roam around the neighbouring areas to collect them. They're usually roving at the end of the day or early in the morning," Kumar adds.

Theft is a common problem faced by retailers worldwide. According to the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention in the US, more than $35 million (Dh128.56 million) worth of goods is stolen from retailers every day. That's more than $13 billion a year.

Kamal Vachani, director of Almaya Group, declines to disclose how much merchandise is stolen from their stores every year, but he maintains that the scale of losses is not hurting their profits.

"It is minimal only. We have installed cameras and also posted security guards in our supermarkets. We have also put security tags in the expensive items like shavers and [razor] blades, which can be [put] in the pocket," Vachani explains.

However, in the last two years, the retailer had spent Dh300,000 on the installation of cameras and other security devices to monitor and minimise store pilferage.

The spending is expected to increase to Dh500,000 in the near future. "The company normally spends Dh35,000 for the security system in each new shop," Vachani adds.

Aside from investing in surveillance technology, retailers have also commissioned a team of plainclothes security personnel to keep an eye on suspicious shoppers.

"Our stores are specifically monitored by closed circuit television, and simultaneously through an outsourced security agency, which are constantly monitoring each isle."

"We also have in certain stores undercover security agents. Employees working at store level are constantly undergoing training through our academy to be vigilant of suspicious individuals," says Manoj Thanwani, managing director at Choithram supermarkets.

But it seems shoplifting isn't the only theft-related problem bugging Dubai's retailers. Other stores, especially the small ones, have to deal with internal theft or fraud, according to Gerson De Belchior, who owns three De Belchior supermarkets in Dubai.

De Belchior says retail theft accounts for five to six per cent of his daily sales.

He maintains the amount of goods stolen by shoppers is very "negligible," but what disturbs him most is the amount of money and goods he's losing to his staff regularly.

"Theft by shoppers is not much of a problem, but employees are the main culprits," he says.