I was the victim of a crime at the supermarket today!

So there I was, walking up and down the aisles of my local supermarket, occasionally leaving the trolley at the end of an aisle if I only needed one item and little did I know that someone, as yet unidentified, took the pound from my trolley lock!  I didn’t discover the theft until I took my trolley back and plugged in the key to retrieve the coin. (No it hadn’t fallen out; it was firmly in place.)

So I popped back into the supermarket and had a chat with the security staff.  They took my allegation seriously and gave me my pound back and the boss sent one of his guys around the store in plain clothes to see if he could find the culprit. 

I didn’t hang around, but I’m glad I went back to the store to point out the problem.  It dawned on me that a thief with a stolen key (easily removed from another trolley with the right tool) has access to all of this supermarket’s trolleys at all of its stores.  Having thought about it I reckon that a thief could easily make a fiver or more in 30 minutes; enough for a sandwich and a cup of tea. 

Just think how easy this crime really is.  You pretend you’re a fellow shopper and push a trolley around the store. There are plenty of opportunities to steal the pounds from unattended trolleys. The crime takes maybe 3 seconds to commit. The victim is very unlikely to notice that the pound has been removed. The victim is very unlikely to report the matter, because it’s just a pound and they don’t want to walk all the way back to the store for it. It is a tiny loss to the individual victim, but there could be lots of victims. 

I’m sure the person doing it is only after the price of a beer or sandwich and I say this because last week I was approached by a guy offering to take my trolley back to the trolley bay for the pound that was in it.

Such is my exciting life at my local supermarket!

Keep ‘em peeled!