Specialty wholesaler Cotswold Fayre has been paying a hefty amount to combat rising crime and theft on its depots by installing CCTVs and extra staff on the shop floor.
Paul Castle, managing director of Cotswold Fayre, a specialty wholesaler based in Reading, told BBC that it “paid a fortune” to have CCTV cameras installed in its two sites while employing extra staff to reduce theft loss.
Castle told BBC, “I think the independent sector is always going to get hit harder than the multiples, because we don’t have as many security guards and all of the barriers.”
Castle said that to prevent theft, Cotswold Fayre has had to hire extra staff to be on the shop floor.
He explained that while this has stopped some of the stock loss, it has also increased the company’s overheads.
"You either suffer the loss of the product going, or you pay for the extra wages to prevent it going in the first place. The reality of it is, we’ve got no other protection or backing or support from anybody or anything. It’s your wits against that of the thief.”
The cost to businesses is about more than just the value of the lost stock.
Castle said, “If somebody comes in and pinches three bottles of vodka and they’re the only three bottles of vodka I’ve got and I’ve got to wait another week [for more], I lose the sales as well as the product.”
Cotswold Fayre
Cotswold Fayre
Cotswold Fayre supplies as a wholesaler the products of over 400 brands into around 2,000 retail sites. In recent years, it begun to operate its own large scale farm shops, under the Flourish brand, which it uses to showcase the range in its wholesale division.
Its currently supplies to a broad mix of operators from farm shops, which account for 30 per cent of sales, delis, garden centres, convenience stores, which has grown to 13 per cent of sales, department stores, and online retailers, which is now accounts for a hefty 30 per cent of revenues.
Castle's statement comes as an annual crime survey by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) found that in the year to last August, customer theft rose by more than 20 per cent to £2.2 billion, taking the total cost of crime in the retail sector to nearly £4.2 billion, including the cost of crime prevention. Incidents of violence and abuse exceeded 2,000 a day for the first time.
The survey from the BRC found that a third of larger retailers rated the police response to crime on their premises as fair, good or excellent, while majority (61 per cent) considered it poor or very poor.
