Tackling Retail Crime - National ShopKind Week
This article will take approximately 5 minutes to read
Published 9 May 2024 in Raising Awareness
This week we are reminding customers to ShopKind in our stores and acknowledge the important role of shopworkers to communities. The ShopKind campaign urges the public to be mindful of shopworkers’ essential role serving the public and emphasises that workers should be treated with respect, kindness and gratitude.
The ShopKind campaign is uniting the retail sector to tackle violence and abuse against shopworkers by asking people to ‘ShopKind’ when in our stores. Backed by the Home Office we hope all colleagues, members and customers help support the campaign.
Some of the aims of the campaign are to:
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Encourage positive behaviour in shops
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Acknowledge the important role of shopworkers
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Highlight the scale and impact of violence and abuse against shopworkers.
Hear from Meg Ridley, Loss Prevention Manager and Greg Eales, Safe Store Officer about the ShopKind campaign, what we’re doing to keep colleagues safe and how you can help…
How have our stores been involved?
We have asked all stores to get involved in spreading the message to ShopKind by downloading and displaying the posters and shelf talkers to raise awareness of the campaign.
And this week, the Safe Stores Team have been out and about in various stores to help support our colleagues spreading the message to ‘ShopKind.’
A great chance to raise awareness
Our number one driving force for supporting this campaign is to reduce the verbal abuse and threats that our colleagues face on a daily basis. Last year we saw incidents of threat, abuse and violence in our stores an increase by a staggering 120%.
This campaign will help us to gain recognition and encouragement from the public to pressure Police, local authorities and MP’s to take retail crime seriously. We are using this week to engage with PCC’s and Police forces to highlight the issue of retail crime.
Campaign update
As Phil mentioned in his blog, last month he Government announced plans to make assaulting a retail worker a separate criminal offence…
“This comes after more than six years of campaigning by the co-operative movement together with USDAW, retail trade associations and other retailers. Which truly demonstrates what the power of co-operation can achieve.
This is of course a major milestone, but it is not the end of the road. We will of course continue to work closely with local police forces to bring those who commit retail crime to justice and will always take a zero-tolerance approach to criminal incidents that affect our colleagues, members, customers and local communities.”
Here are some photos of our colleagues in-store supporting the campaign this week...
