The after-school job stacking supermarket shelves might become a thing of the past, with the head of Foodstuffs North Island warning parents don't want their kids working in grocery stores amid a spike in crime.
It comes after Foodstuffs released new statistics on Tuesday showing there have been 3900 incidents in its North Island stores from May to July this year: a 59 percent increase year-on-year and up almost 19 percent on the last quarter.
Foodstuffs also released photos and videos of brazen thefts and attacks on both staff members and security guards, which were among the crimes committed in recent months.
In one case, Foodstuffs said a man tried to steal nine legs of lamb while armed with a screwdriver.
In another case, two men are seen trying to steal baskets of food. When a security guard confronts them, he is brutally attacked.
Foodstuffs North Island chief executive Chris Quin told AM on Tuesday people no longer feel safe working at supermarkets.
"I'm now talking to parents of teenagers and school kids and young people who don't want their kids working inside a retail environment because of what they're seeing and what they're hearing," he said.
"Gosh, that's a shame in New Zealand, isn't it? The after-school job was always sort of a real thing that everyone did and to have people now feel like it's just not that safe to do it is just not acceptable."
The stats also showed that serious incidents reported by Foodstuffs stores - such as assault, robbery and burglary - have more than doubled year on year, and are already up 13 percent in the last quarter. Repeat offenders were involved in over a third of all incidents.
The number of acts committed grew by 44 percent to 1862 across the North Island's New World, Pak'nSave and Four Square stores.
Foodstuffs also said there is an increasing number of assaults in-store, with 54 separate attacks, mostly on frontline staff, in the last three months alone - up from 39 in the previous quarter and 16 in the same period in 2022. Shoplifting accounted for three-quarters of all offences and was up 78 percent year-on-year.
Quin said Foodstuffs is now seeing an average of four assaults every week, with an average of five people having to take time off work after being physically injured by violent behaviour.
It has led Foodstuffs to boost their security measures with Quin saying they're considering using doors, grates and grills to keep staff safe.
He also said Foodstuffs is looking at implementing artificial intelligence (AI) to target repeat offenders.
"We think technology probably plays a role next in this. The ability to see someone entering the store that we might have already trespassed and intervene at the front door rather than further in or when something unfolds. We've got to try to take some sort of proactive action," he said.
Quin confirmed Foodstuffs was talking to the Privacy Commission about how it could best use AI.
"The ability to see a trespassed person: someone who has previously caused an issue and has been issued a trespass order in the store and intervene with them at the front door and ask them not to enter the store," he explained.
"That would be the only information that would be kept and the only information that would be used by trained people who would then just politely but firmly intervene and say, 'You're not going to be coming into the store. Please don't'. We think that will help with some of the more extreme incidences that we're seeing."
He told AM co-host Laura Tupou that while there is a lot of support for staff, it's hard to keep up with the number of attacks that are occurring.
"We have a lot of support sitting around our teams. We have a lot of wellbeing support and we have a lot of managers trained in how to spot people who are feeling the stress," he said.
"But it's really hard when this stuff is coming at us at the sort of volumes it is. Just under 4000 incidents between May and July."
Watch the full interview with Chris Quin in the video above.
