Iceland brings in £1 rule effective immediately with shoppers warnedIceland has introduced a new £1 rule for shoppers as the chief of the frozen food retailer speaks out. Shoppers will be paid to snitch on shoplifters, Richard Walker has confirmed.
Mr Walker, a Labour Party donor, said the chain would give shoppers £1 on their bonus cards if they point out thieves to store workers.
Iceland’s boss has said customers will be paid £1 to point out shoplifters to staff amid the shoplifting epidemic. “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.
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“We will put it on their bonus card if they see any customer in our stores who are undertaking that offence.”
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.”
“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.”
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.
Association of Convenience Stores (ACS) chief executive James Lowman said the official statistics were only part of the story.
Separate figures from the ACS crime report found convenience stores recorded more than 6.2 million incidents of shoplifting in the past year, Mr Lowman said as he spoke out earlier this year.