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Radio 5 Live,2 mins

Are self service tills leading to more theft?

5 Live In Short

Available for over a year

A Leicester University report found that some, usually honest, shoppers resort to theft at self-service check-outs simply because they can. Writer and actor for The Real Hustle, Alexis Conran, said: "if people get the chance to steal, they will do so." The technology means that it becomes ‘easy for people genuinely make a mistake’ when putting things though the till, but ‘It also becomes very easy for people to excuse that they’ve made a mistake’ said Conran. The study involved data from nearly 12 million shopping trips from four major British retailers as well others in the US, Belgium and Holland between 2013 and 2015. The researchers found that introducing self-checkouts raised the rate of loss by 122 per cent to an average of 3.9 per cent of turnover. This clip was taken from 5 live Drive on 3rd August 2016.

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