Tesco employees are offered body cams due to crime concerns.

Since last year, there has been a 30% spike in physical attacks at the company.

It is consistent with research by the British Retail Consortium (BRC) from earlier this year, which revealed that abuse of shop personnel has nearly quadrupled since before the implementation of Covid.

Sainsbury's, Waitrose, and Co-op have previously taken similar moves.

Ken Murphy, the CEO of Tesco, urged for stricter regulations that target criminals.

However, he wants "abuse or violence towards retail workers" to be deemed an offense in and of itself. He acknowledged that adjustments had been made to make striking a store employee an aggravating element in convictions.

More than 850 daily events were reported in 2021/22 in the BRC's Crime Survey, which was released in March. This is a sharp increase from the 450 daily incidences pre-Covid in 2019/20.

Furthermore, more than 200 shops in the UK are represented by the trade organisation, which said that the cost of retail crime in 2021/22 was £1.76 billion, with £953 million lost to consumer theft and £715 million spent on prevention.

As a result of the escalating crime rates, which the grocery store Co-op said had climbed by more than a third in the previous year, it issued a warning in July that some neighbourhoods would become "no-go" regions for the firm.

According to a Freedom of Information Act request, 71% of significant retail crimes went unreported by police, indicating that many police agencies were not giving them a high priority.

(Sources: bbc.co.uk)