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ICELAND customers will be paid to snitch on shoplifters, the supermarket’s boss has pledged.
Richard Walker said the chain would give shoppers £1 on their bonus cards if they point out thieves to store workers.
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He said this would help the chain to lower its prices, as shoplifting currently costs Iceland over £20million a year.
Iceland is believed to be the first major UK supermarket to bring in incentives for shoppers who snitch on the criminals.
“I’d actually like to announce that we will give a pound to any customer who points out a shoplifter,” he told Channel 5 News on Wednesday.
“We will put it on their bonus card if they see any customer in our stores who are undertaking that offence.”
Asked if he thought the policy would deter thieves, he said: “Well, yeah, because some people see it as a victimless crime. It is not.
“It also keeps prices from being lowered because it’s a cost to the business, it’s a cost to the hours that we pay our colleagues, as well as it obviously being about intimidation and violence.”
Mr Walker also revealed that shoplifting costs the supermarket chain more than £20million a year.
“That’s not £20 million of profit. That’s just £20 million that we could pay in more hours to our colleagues or in lowering prices,” he said.
“So we’d like our customers to help us lower our prices even more by pointing out shoplifters and then we’ll give them a quid back.”
It comes after The Sun revealed that Britain’s shoplifting epidemic is costing households almost £147 a year, as stores hike prices to recoup their losses and pay for extra security measures.
Many major high street chains have added alarm tags and stickers, each costing around £50, to protect their goods.
Some are even going a step further to deter thieves.
A Tesco Express in Brighton, for example, recently locked all of its beer and wine behind tills with spirits and cigarettes.
Some retailers, including Ann Summers, are even arming staff with body cameras to combat theft.
There were 516,971 shoplifting crimes last year, according to the Office for National Statistics – a 20 per cent increase on 2023 when 429,873 offences were recorded.
Mr Walker’s comments come just days after Iceland announced it would have to hike food prices following the Rachel Reeves’ tax raid on businesses.
In recently published accounts, the retailer said National Insurance and minimum wage hikes had led to increased supplier costs.
It was a significant U-turn to comments made by Mr Walker in January, when he told The Telegraph that companies should stop “wallowing” and complaining about the measures announced in Labour’s Autumn Budget.
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