Helen Dickinson’s defence of retail pricing… Food inflation will “drop to single digits by the end of this year”
Is that really going to stop a slump in consumer trust and what is shaping up to be a perfect storm for Loss Prevention!?!
Helen Dickinson - BRC
Scanning my news feeds for the day, two stories hit me right between the eyes…
“New Zealand To Wipe Out Every Rat,” and “Retailers Trusted Less Than Bankers.”
In both cases my question is, “How is that possible!?!”
Given the vital service retail provides our nation with, it seems incomprehensible that public opinion has turned against them. And yet, here we are social pariahs along with the banks and financial institutions, who HAVE in my opinion profiteered; consistently putting up the cost of borrowing to over 6% whilst paying paltry returns to savers.
This week retailers have been given a grilling in Parliament over the amount of money that they make.
Questions, insinuating retail is operating in some sort of price fixing cartel, have been asked. Politicians, trade unionists and the Governor of The Bank of England have all questioned why supermarket prices have not fallen as rapidly as the wholesale cost of ingredients, such as wheat. Some have suggested that retailers might be failing to pass on the savings and are banking the profits instead.
Then again, a study by the London School of Economics last month concluded that nearly a third of food price inflation since 2019 was due to Brexit. So, who’s right?
The BRC’s Helen Dickinson assured the committee that the BRC confidently expected food inflation to be in single digits before the end of the year. To be honest, I am not sure that your average struggling household is going to take much comfort from the possibility of “just” 9% annual inflation by the end of the year. And it certainly isn’t going to reverse public perception about retail.
All of these insinuations, blame games and conspiracy theories will undoubtedly lead to the continued decline in trust the public has in retail. And the consequences are probably going to be that retailers are made to suffer…
Back to the BRC, their annual report says that the number of assaults on staff have now increased to a record level of, on average, 850 a day. Only recently I also highlighted the increased amount of theft in retail, which has reached an all-time high on the ACS Theft Index. And of course, there is the apparently increasing social acceptance of shoplifting as either a means of protest or as an acceptable way to deal with hard times.
And all this comes at a time when retail staff are feeling insecure about their jobs too…
In Retail Week’s new Talking Shop report frontline workers were asked, between March and April of this year, how they feel about their roles. More than half (58%) of the workforce felt neither “very secure” nor “secure” about their jobs – double the 24% reported when the same survey was conducted between September and October 2020.
My question to you is this. How effective are frontline staff going to be at combatting rising crime, when they are themselves increasingly subjected to assault and are more concerned than before about their job security? I foresee the unfortunate consequences being indifference to protecting an employer’s property and perhaps a greater propensity for internal shrink. Everything is stacking against retailers, and we are sailing into a perfect storm for Loss Prevention.
Not wishing to be added to the list of alleged profiteers, I would urge retailers to task physical risk management specialists, such as Intrepid, to be creative in the approach to target hardening at a time when good people trust retailers less and bad people are using that as a green light for criminal activities.
I am not sure I have “the silver bullet” of a solution. The instant fix that everyone wishes they had. However, I do think that more can be done and respectfully urge retailers to work with their suppliers to find solutions…
Tap into the creativity, experience and innovative talents of specialist suppliers. Because for many retailers the hard truth may be that their current systems are turning their customers against them through perceived poor shopping experiences and in addition, their staff are feeling increasingly threatened, and they are still losing vast amounts of money!
I challenge you to challenge us…
Contact us by phone: 01372 736980 or by email: info@intrepidgroup.co.uk
“How effective are frontline staff going to be at combatting rising crime, when they are themselves increasingly subjected to assault and are more concerned than before about their job security?”