Pret a Manger has become the latest high street staple to deploy body-worn cameras for some of its staff.
The coffee and bakery chain began trialling body-worn cameras in a select number of shops in London last month. A Pret spokesperson said this was done as a new safety measure. “These are only being worn by team leaders or managers, and are only turned on in specific circumstances,” the spokesperson said.
Signs have been put up in shops conducting the trial to let customers know. The cameras will not always be recording and will only be switched on in specific circumstances. This will be at the discretion of management in-store. Only Pret’s security team will have access to any footage captured, the chain confirmed.
Pret a Manger is not the only chain to offer body-worn cameras to staff. Last year, Tesco began offering the cameras to members of staff after it said physical assaults had risen by a third in a year.
The Co-op has installed more than 200 secure till kiosks, locked cabinets for bottles of spirits and AI technology in its supermarkets to monitor self-checkouts after a 44% surge in retail crime last year to about 1,000 incidents a day.
The new initiatives come as shop workers in the UK face rising abuse in the workplace. Earlier this year, a survey by the British Retail Consortium, the trade body that represents most major retailers, found that shop workers were facing 1,300 incidents of violence and abuse a day.
Retailers experienced a 50% rise in the number of incidents of racial abuse, sexual harassment, physical assaults and threats with weapons last year, while thefts more than doubled to 16.7m incidents.
The rise in retail crime has coincided with a period of rampant price inflation, with the cost of everyday goods from eggs to baby formula increasing over the past two years at a rate not experienced since records began in the 1970s, leaving many families struggling to make ends meet.
Last October, almost 90 retail leaders, including the bosses of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Boots and WH Smith, wrote to the government demanding action on rising retail crime, in which violent criminals are “emptying stores”.
“The police consistently tell us that a lack of data about these offences means they have no visibility about the nature or scale of the issue,” the letter says.
Last September, Sharon White, the chair of John Lewis Partnership, which owns John Lewis and Waitrose, described shoplifting in the UK as an “epidemic”.