Grocery theft costs Australian supermarkets more than 280 mln USD annually

Grocery theft cost Australian supermarkets more than 284 million U.S. dollars in the last year alone.

According to British criminologist, Adrian Beck's latest research, which was published in Australian media on Thursday, self-service checkouts normalize theft in supermarkets.

"People are very good at neutralizing their moral concerns when thinking about stealing things ... and people can end up feeling they have a right to get their share of the corporate profits," Beck told Fairfax Media on Thursday.

A Melbourne radio station on Thursday morning revealed the myriad ways in which shoppers regularly cheated the system.

A former supermarket employee Brianna, who monitored the self-check out area, told the radio station that she would catch at least 15 people a day stealing from the supermarket, in a problem she described as "rife."

"It's the people that you wouldn't think, people with prams, people with elderly and pushers are the ones that are getting away with it," Brianna said.

In what she described as "the oldest trick in the book," one of the most common ways to scam the system was to "eat as you shop."

"You start at the fresh produce section, and take some grapes and nuts, you walk around, and by the time you get to the checkout, it's all gone," she explained.

Another popular scam is for shoppers to scan a barcode, or choose a cheaper priced product, at the checkout machine.

Examples include scanning a watermelon in exchange for a more expensive punnet of strawberries; choosing green capsicum on the system instead of the more expensive red capsicum, and scanning a variety of apples at the cheaper price.

Shoppers are also known to use an "accomplice," where a pre-planned person steals their shopping after scanning through all the products, and the shopper then "claims that someone stole their shopping."

"If you are asking me to wander around the store, pick up items, look after my children, push a trolley, take on board all the advertising you're pushing at me, pick up the items, make sure I scan it and put it in my basket ... that's a lot of things to do and there's a lot of things that can go wrong," Beck said.

Beck's research indicates that people are prepared to be dishonest at the self-service checkouts, when they wouldn't dare doing the same thing on the supermarket floor. Enditem