'Some shoppers tend to cheat at self-checkout tills'

Shoppers tend to cheat at self-checkout tills while some use such tills to steal from stores, a recent survey has found.

According to the poll of 1,099 adults by Ipsos, one in eight adults (13 per cent) said they had selected a cheaper item on a self-service till than the one they were buying. If applied to the entire UK adult population, it would mean six million people have taken advantage of self-checkouts to steal from shops.

Eight per cent of the adults questioned admitted they had taken something from a shop up to the value of £10 without paying. Thirteen per cent said they had taken something from a shop that was worth up to £1. More than a quarter (26 per cent) said they did not believe that shoplifting goods worth under £10 should be an offence, and almost half (47 per cent) believed the same about stealing goods valued under £1.

A similar proportion (48 per cent) said they did not believe the “banana trick” – putting a cheaper item through the till – should be treated as a criminal offence. The apparent increase in such thefts stems from a 50 per cent rise in the number of self-checkout machines in UK supermarkets from 53,000 to 80,000.

More than a quarter (26 per cent) of those polled by Ipsos admitted they had accidentally not paid for an item when shopping. A third (34 per cent) thought such behaviour was “acceptable” and 71 per cent said they did not believe it should be a criminal offence.

Hannah Shrimpton, the Ipsos head of crime, cohesion and security said the majority of the public still believed even low-value shoplifting was wrong even if there was a minority which admitted to it.

“While a quarter of Britons admit to unintentionally failing to pay for an item, with a third finding this acceptable, the overwhelming majority think intentional theft is unacceptable, even of low-value items,” she said. “This suggests a clear distinction in public perception- accidental oversights are seen by a minority at least as forgivable, and by most as not worth criminal sanction, while deliberate theft, regardless of value, faces strong disapproval.”

Many leading stores in the UK have removed the self-checkout tills although this is largely to do with customers finding them slow and frustrating to use.

The findings come after Archie Norman, the chairman of Marks & Spencer, said that shoplifting was becoming more common among middle-class customers because of faulty checkouts.

“With the reduction of service you get in a lot of shops, a lot of people think, ‘This didn’t scan properly, or it’s very difficult to scan these things through and I shop here all the time. It’s not my fault, I’m owed it.’... You see it with the self-checkouts, there’s a little bit of that creeping in,” Norman said.