The Day Before The Night Before Christmas

December 23rd is traditionally the busiest Christmas shopping day of the year. This is particularly true in the grocery sector as people ready themselves for preparing huge family meals fortified with liberal amounts of alcohol.

It is expected that at least £10m worth of food, drink and last minute gifts will pass through Britain’s supermarket checkouts every hour over the course of the day. Around a third of this will be accounted for by customers scanning their own shopping.

Larger than normal baskets full of plenty of fresh produce and limited-run seasonal items make the checkout process incredibly complicated at this time of year. Add in the pressure that store staff face when queues start to build, and the stress that customers already feel in busy stores with a thousand other things on their to-do list, we are expecting to see a significant increase in the number of errors and a peak in the vale of losses.

Losses at all the country’s tills could get close to £200,000 by the end of the day. This includes genuine errors, which are inevitable, as well as deliberate attempts to game the system with product switching, making partial payment and so on.

SAI gives retailers accurate and reliable store-wide protection all year round, preventing losses at staffed and self-service checkouts, and instantly alerting to shoplifting attempts. Our Virtual Shop Assistant can also help you keep your shelves stocked and warn about potential slip or trip hazards.