Lincoln had foul weather at the weekend, at times you could not see the towers of the cathedral for the low cloud. When we went in the Tesco just beyond the city’s business improvement district (BID) boundary, a helpful security officer at the entrance (did I see the Mitie logo on his back?) directed us to the ‘meal deal’ aisle. I chose instead half-price bags of almond croissants, although Lidl does them as good and much cheaper, and Waitrose’s though much dearer are the ones to trade your grandmother for. That could be a metaphor for Tesco’s recent history. Gone is Tesco’s nationwide swagger of the 1990s and 2000s, although I read it’s still Britain’s largest supermarket retailer in terms of physical shops.
No national guarding
I must get out of my notebook and into Professional Security Magazine what I was told last year about Tesco’s guarding contract. It’s large, nine figures a year, and hence important even to £4 billion a year turnover Mitie (the facilities management firm’s largest private sector customer according to its latest plc statement is in fact Lloyds Banking Group). That Tesco went with numerous contractors would suggest (not that the UK needed any reminding after the embarrassment of G4S not meeting the 2012 Olympics contract) businesses see the sense of not putting all their guarding eggs in one basket. Also, that the UK doesn’t have any truly national guarding firms. I happened to go in another Tesco supermarket the weekend before that had a guard at the entrance too. Retailers can and do use data to judge when it pays best to have a security presence in-store, because all-hours guarding is expensive when like Tesco you have stores open 7am to 11pm, and the risk is not the same all that time (if I am regularly seeing guards, do my shopping habits match those of the thieves?!). Certainly, besides, the theft risks to supermarkets are different compared to, lets say, convenience stores, and branches of Boots at main rail stations, where you do routinely see guards at doors.
Just as law-abiding shoppers have choice and can and do travel between supermarkets in the same town, or even neighbouring and out of town places, so do the thieves. To think of my own town, within a mile are a Tesco, Lidl, Sainsbury’s and Aldi. In any town, thieves, whether opportunistic stealing to pay for a drug addiction, or organised gangs stealing as a business model, will not call at one or the other, but will exploit vulnerabilities they spot. A pair of security officers by bicycle or even on foot could well cover the four and save the retailers collectively. Even if retail had the appetite for such collaboration, what would be the vehicle for it? Hence BIDs; see next article.
