With the rise in food prices, supermarkets are going so far as to place padlocks on their freezers because of the drastic increase in thefts in New York.
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This is what has been observed in the Big Apple, where shoplifters are interested, among other things, in a very particular commodity: high-end ice cream.
Quarts of ice cream now come with special locked lids in some businesses, reports the New York Post.
A supermarket on the Upper West Side placed these special lids on boxes of Häagen-Dazs that sold for $6.
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Robert Miller via le New York Post
It is at the checkout that customers who buy it can have this protection mechanism removed with a special device.
Other stores have simply chosen to place padlocks on their ice cream freezers.
A message is even written there for the attention of consumers.
“To help keep the cost as low as possible, a protective lock has been placed on some ice cream units,” it read. “This lock will be removed at checkout by a store associate. We apologize for any inconvenience.”
A New York convenience store that padlocked its freezers to protect its Breyers ice cream displays has explained its decision.
“People would come with trash bags and fill them with ice cream. They were emptying our freezers,” said a store employee.
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Robert Miller via le New York Post
In another convenience store, the situation is the same.
“We had to put padlocks on because people kept stealing our Red Bull and our ice cream,” adds another employee.
Other stores have literally put permanent locks on their freezers, which annoys customers who have to wait for help from an employee to make their purchases.
Shoplifting rates have skyrocketed across New York City with 13,738 retail thefts reported in the first quarter of 2023, according to the most recent NYPD data.
In contrast, an average of only 8,750 retail thefts were reported each quarter in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic.
This shoplifting crisis has been fueled in part by the Bail Reform Act of 2019 which requires judges to release felons who commit misdemeanors and certain non-violent crimes.
The soft-on-crime approach encourages repeat thefts, police say. A third of all shoplifting last year involved the same 327 people, who were re-arrested thousands of times.
2023-07-01 15:08:11
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