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NT Alice Springs: 2024 Curfew
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Chief
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Tania and Kevin Parkes who ran City News Kalgoorlie in Western Australia's Goldfields-Esperance region, east of Perth, for almost a decade shut up shop on Saturday ahead of new owners taking over in July.
Fed up of thieves stealing items from the store, the couple made the difficult decision to sell the newsagency.
It's terrible if the community loses an outlet like that over shoplifting, but it seems like the new owners are willing to take the risk?
CakeEater
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They are, but its caused a kerfuffle in Kal as the lady who alledgly stole the coke bottle and threatened Mrs Parkes was off the charge by the magistrate without Mrs Parkes being called to give evidence which is interesting.
Caused a ruckus in Kal
Only a 14 year old Corolla but the woman keyed my car thinking it was the pool manager's that wouldn't let her in with kids during school hours when it went to court all she got was a $500 fine for criminal damage lol.
That story seems suspicious wouldn't there be camera footage of the whole thing?
- May 13, 2014
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Where are the youngsters getting the idea to steal?
Why does it seem acceptable to them?
I've seen mobs move through the outback town I lived in for a number of years and lay waste to our supermarket and town facilities. There was no particular age demographic.
Often times these mobs would have police escorts as they'd travel across country from remote SA and NT to parts of WA for tribal business and important funerals. They would be driving cars on the roads missing bonnets, doors and windscreens whilst under escort.
Just for some balance with where I now live.
I moved my family to Ballarat around 18 months ago, both my daughters who are students work at the Coles store in Sebastopol, the theft there is off the charts.
Staff are expressly forbidden from stopping them and the people know it, the locals post about it on FB all the time. The staff all know who the repeat and worst offenders are, they have nicknames for them all and communicate with each other on their headsets when, 'stealing grandma' walks in with her little trolley.
People will load up with $2 or $3,000 worth of meat and cosmetics and just walk out the door.
The store is only a couple of years old, they conducted a stocktake after the first 8 months and were down just shy of $1m.
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Dogs_R_Us
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And the supermarkets are told they’re ripping off customers when they are making up for the shortfall caused by customers ripping them off!
Chief
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- #459
Most kids dabble in small misbehaviour like shoplifting. So the first theft isn't really the problem. But most people stop. They grow out of it. The ones who continue are the problem.
A friend of a family member was always a bit more flush than his job seemed to allow for. Turns out his mum in NZ - European - was part of a major shop lifting ring making big money and subsidising her son in Australia.
We don't hear much about this sort of thing unless the thief is non-white.
Shoplifting is rife in south Canberra as well mostly by teenagers and Druggies amd store staff are told to do nothing as the courts will never punish them even if they punch or shove staff or customers to get away. Just another symptom of the under policing that plagues Australia but doesn't get commented on here because 1) not marginal electorates and 2) they are mostly white scum and the worst are from well off families
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- May 13, 2014
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Despite what peoples' perception are of Canberra from outside the bubble, iirc, when we lived there in the 90s and early 2000s, Canberra was statistically the armed robbery capital of Australia, with all the the junkies using knives and syringes to rob people.
My wife had a video store (remember them) in Mawson. There was a large bus stop outside and people were constantly od'ing at the stop and my wife having to call an ambulance for them, She was held up twice at knife point and we were frequently getting calls at 3am from the police because of the smack addicts breaking into the rear of the shop thinking it was the chemist next door.
There was a long pink building across the road which was public housing, it was called The Great Wall because of it's appearance. There was also a Canberra Raiders Leagues club next to them, ready to suck all of the taxpayers' money out of them when the woke up and staggered outside.
Would you attribute increased shoplifting to that? The systems in place now seem quite foolproof to the point of annoying legitimate shoppers with false alerts and exit gates.
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Ghost Patrol
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Down $1m of stock at retail price or wholesale cost?
What was their profit for that time period?
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- May 13, 2014
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Getting off topic here but the click and collect service that Coles offer is costing them a packet and it"s super inefficient compared to what it replaced. If they could get rid of it they would but there's now too much demand for it.
The people stealing are just walking straight through staffed registers too, they don't care, there's no repercussions for them.
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I cant believe how ****ing lazy people have gotten with this click and collect shit.
Always massively overweight people leaning on their boot at the shops near me waiting for Woolies kids to bring their groceries out.
Gethelred
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- May 1, 2016
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I know that - within the last two years; I quit my job at a shopping centre last year, in quite an affluent part of Vic - shoplifting was absolutely rife across the board, and it's mainly attributable to a much easier time leaving the store with any amount of products.
Think about it. Once upon a time, the only way out of a store was to go through a narrow aisle, with a person standing staring at you. The only wider path was next to the cigarette counter, and there was usually a store manager there. Now, if all you do is walk in you can walk out again much easier. There's much less impediment to someone wanting to leave than there used to be, and much less in store supervision.
The other side of it too is that in-store security don't exist the way they used to, either. I've spoken with a number of security guards - we shared an office - and in the past your woolies/coles used to have dedicated loss prevention in store. They don't want to pay for it, just like they didn't want to pay for the employment cost of having manned checkouts. Loss prevention now is to let them go, call the police, and report the theft.
Now, is this system more efficient? No. Does it prevent less loss? Probably not. Does it save them a whole heap of money? When you look at the stats governing business losses from damaged/stolen stock, what you notice is that most of the loss from shopping centres is through wastage, stuff not getting sold before it goes out of date; similarly, the greatest expenditure for these businesses is wages followed by rent.
Without seeing their balance sheets I can't state unequivocally that they're saving more through employing less people/store security than they're losing through shoplifting, but it's not unreasonable to think so.
Gethelred
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I'm sorry, but do we know that?
The people in store probably don't see it; the extent of their involvement is to let people leave and to hand over physical evidence - footage, witness statements, etc - to police. The manager would be the person contacted if/when it went to the next stage by police, and that manager could choose not to share it with their staff or are realistically too busy (and shoplifting too commonplace) to do much more than follow procedure and get on with their days.
However...
If you're asking me if I agree with this approach, no I don't. Operant conditioning is the strongest form of behaviour conditioning we're aware of, and it necessitates that the absolute second an undesired behaviour manifests is the second it should be punished; by delaying consequence for shoplifters, it makes it more likely that they're going to do it again, across multiple stores before the police have enough evidence and can identify them. It's an approach designed by people in a boardroom, who do not have to feel unsafe about the thieves in the store immediately who if identified have to be removed/escorted out by security who absolutely have been assaulted in the process; cost saving at the expense of employee's peace of mind and safety, content in the knowledge that even if the worst happens it's not happening to them and they've got insurance.
You've also got the fact that - ACAB aside - there are not enough police to instantly physically attend to a potential crime, and police are also unwilling to confront a shoplifter immediately. Where I used to work, there were two cars servicing a massive area with multiple other hotspots of activity at night over a weekend; outside of a blitz, there was no chance you could get police to attend the site, and the kids/teenagers knew it. I can remember one day in which in the downstairs lobby area beside the carpark, we had a good 40 odd preteens refusing to leave once prompted and who called others to come to the site and help them make a nuisance of themselves. It took more than half an hour for the police to arrive during the day on a weekend afternoon, and they didn't hang around long; the groups fled upstairs, with most hiding out in the toilets until the police left.
Then, there's other problems. There were three alcohol stores at my centre, with one of them just beside an exit. Just next to the door was the cheap bourbon and whisky, and teenagers would frequently duck in, grab a bottle, and run out. I asked the manager there why the store was laid out the way it was - after I had to clean a dropped bottle of Johnny Red off the floor - and he told me they had no say in where things were or how the store was designed; it was all done at head office.
I'd also like to note that there was little to no indigenous population there, that it was absolutely not just the poorer kids doing this, and that it was pretty ****ing dangerous at times. I can't speak for how it is in Alice Springs, but I had to get between a security guard and a gang of drunk teenagers multiple times and so did other night cleaners. Three guards were assaulted within a sixth month period, with another guard getting stabbed a year or so earlier. There was one group that knew we couldn't kick them out and knew the police only rarely showed up, so they'd sit in our food court and drink openly and laugh (or throw racist slurs) at the security guards. The centre didn't care unless things got damaged or people got hurt; or rather, they cared but not enough to do something about it.
Notice a pattern here? The problem isn't just kids or shoplifters: the problem is policy, handed down from higher management, which results in crime being easier to commit and the victims of the experience of it left dealing with the fallout of it.
The problem is that management and business decided that cost saving trumps safety, IMO.
That is what the staff have been told, certainly the kids and Druggies have no fear.
Shoving or punching to get someone out of the way I suspect that even in Canbera if it was continual punching etc then the police might bother to arrest them.
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The question I want to know is if someone is living a lifetime on welfare and they rack up thousands of $ in court fines is do they even have to pay it all back? Does payments just get slowly taken out at $30 a week or something?
Ghost Patrol
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Does this include corporate and middle class welfare, or just poor people welfare?
People of all classes often don't pay fines. It's the poor people that are more likely to be locked up for it though.
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When I worked in a prison, if a crook was being released and they had, in one case, $70,000 in unpaid fines, they'd offer to wipe them I'm exchange for doing a few extra weeks inside, which imo was a good idea. If the idea is for them not to come back there was no point in releasing them with that weighing them down.
Ghost Patrol
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If someone that receives franking credits doesn't pay a speeding fine, do they deduct it from their franking credits?
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