Recent analysis reported by The Grocer has confirmed what many retailers already suspect: supermarket theft is peaking, and certain products and times of day are particularly high-risk.
AI analysis of 1,000 supermarket shoplifting incidents captured on CCTV found that the most commonly stolen items were beverages (22%), fresh produce (19%) and bakery items (10%). The research also showed that theft is most likely to occur on weekday afternoons (46.6%) and weekday evenings (30.4%). Alongside this, The Grocer found that 37% of UK shoppers admitted they had failed to scan at least one item when using self-checkouts.
Retailers are already investing heavily in technology to counter these issues. Shoppers are increasingly familiar with cameras and live screens above self-checkouts, gates that only unlock when a valid receipt is scanned and trolley-weighing technology that flags discrepancies.
Several major retailers are also trialling or rolling out AI systems that monitor CCTV footage in real time at self-checkouts to spot suspicious behaviour. The Grocer’s research highlights the most common ways shoppers are avoiding payment: leaving items in the basket or bagging area without scanning them, performing a “fake scan”, or simply holding products back and never scanning them at all. This isn’t organised crime; it is everyday theft, happening at scale.
We identified this trend several years ago and launched our Revenue Protection audits, now used by some of the biggest names in UK retail. These audits are designed to test exactly the behaviours highlighted in The Grocer’s research. Our trained auditors act as everyday customers and attempt to conceal items, fake scan products or leave items in baskets or bagging areas to see whether store teams are trained, confident and empowered enough to intervene.
The aim is to understand whether potentially stolen items are being stopped before they leave the store. All audits are pre-agreed with the client, clearly controlled, and no unpaid products ever leave the premises – but the insight for retailers is very real.
Alongside The Grocer’s analysis of 1,000 incidents, Serve Legal holds a data bank of tens of thousands of Revenue Protection audits in 2025 alone. Broadly, our findings support their core conclusions, but there are some important differences that matter for operational decisions.
Across our client base, we see pass rates decrease throughout the day. The proportion of customers able to complete a transaction with a concealed item increases by 6% from morning to evening. While The Grocer identified Thursdays as a key day for theft, our wider compliance data – including years of age verification work – consistently shows lower pass rates in the evenings and at weekends.
This pattern repeats year after year. Evenings and weekends bring higher footfall and a shift in both customer and staff demographics as young people are out of education and either working or shopping. Stores are busier, pressure is higher, and the likelihood of errors naturally increases. In Revenue Protection specifically, our data shows that compliance drops to its lowest over the weekend, with a 24% drop in pass rates between Wednesday mornings and Sunday evenings. In practice, that means around one in four more customers are able to complete a supermarket transaction without paying for at least one item over the weekend than during the week.
Technology is essential, but it is only half the answer. AI cameras and smarter checkouts can flag suspicious behaviour, but they cannot replace clear training, confident staff, and store-level visibility of when and where revenue is being lost.
Serve Legal’s Revenue Protection audits give retailers tangible shop-floor insight into real behaviours, time-of-day and day-of-week patterns, and the points in the process where things break down. They highlight whether staff feel able to challenge, where policy and practice don’t match, and where additional training or resource is needed.
The real question is how much revenue is quietly disappearing through self-checkouts and front-end processes – and how much of that could be prevented with better insight and focused intervention.
Revenue protection schemes present themselves in different ways, and Serve Legal offers a range of audit types that can all be tailored to your business needs.
To get a grip on shoplifting and “missed scans”, retailers need to understand their hotspot stores and regions, the riskiest times of day, the days of the week when compliance drops, and the behaviours that staff are missing most often. That is exactly what Serve Legal’s Revenue Protection audits are built to deliver.
For more on Serve Legal’s Revenue Protection services, visit our website page. To discuss these findings or your own risk profile in more detail, get in touch with one of our service managers and we’ll walk you through what our data could do for your business.