Retail crime and the price of justification in 2026

Retail crime may dominate the political script of 2025, yet beneath the headlines lies a deeper re-evaluation of what Australians now deem fair, permissible or even forgivable inside retail environments.In the year ahead, retailers will confront a risk landscape that is reshaped as much by ethics as economics.Victoria’s recent decision to introduce tougher penalties for assaults on frontline workers marks a decisive turn. Threatening or attacking a shop assistant now carries prison terms of up to five years, while ram raids have been reclassified as aggravated burglary, drawing penalties of up to 25 years in prison.The reforms reflect urgency, as retail crime incidents in Victoria rose by more than 20 per cent in 2025 and the state now accounts for about a third of all cases nationally.As the year turns, the policy response to retail crime has continued to harden rather than recede. Retail peak bodies have renewed calls for permanent retail crime taskforces, faster workplace protection orders and more consistent policing across states, arguing that legislative reform must now be matched by enforcement capacity. At the same time, emerging data suggests police resourcing in parts of Victoria has tightened even as reported retail crime remains elevated, reinforcing industry concerns that deterrence alone will not close the gap. The effect is a widening pressure point for retailers: expectations of safer stores are rising faster than the systems designed to deliver them.For the industry, the mood is relief edged with frustration. Australian Retailers Association CEO Chris Rodwell described it as “encouraging that Victoria has finally acted on the concerns retailers have been raising for two years”.Yet enforcement, retailers argue, is only one part of the solution. Crime may appear on the shop floor, but its roots stretch further, into strained household budgets, digital anonymity, shifting social norms, and changes in younger Australians’ moral calculus.From deviance to justificationThe latest cultural portrait comes from Monash Business School’s Australian Consumer and Retail Studies (ACRS) unit, whose Consumer Deviance Spotlight 2025 Report maps shoppers’ attitudes toward theft, “soft deviance” and shopping-centre safety.The findings expose a generational fault line. As the study revealed, “more than one in four consumers believed retail theft was justifiable to some degree”, including taking an item without paying (27 per cent), changing price tags (30 per cent), not scanning items (32 per cent) and scanning them as cheaper products (36 per cent).While 85–89 per cent acknowledged these behaviours were illegal, their perceived legitimacy, especially among younger shoppers, signals a drift.As ACRS research & strategy director Stephanie Atto explained, “Cross-national research in Europe also found younger age groups judged deviant behaviours more leniently. Interestingly, this effect was stronger in societies that had greater individual flexibility and tolerance of deviance. In other words, these age differences occurred more in loose-knit societies.”Australia ranks highly for this cultural trait. “Geert Hofstede’s model of national culture shows that Australia is considered a highly individualistic and loosely knit society, with a score of 90 out of 100,” Atto noted.Individualism brings empowerment but also erosion. The same cultural looseness that prizes autonomy can dilute collective accountability.This is also where the category of “soft deviance” emerges. As Atto put it, “Motivations for deviant behaviours can be due to a wide range of reasons. The cost-of-living crisis is ongoing and Aussies may be looking to save money and digital normalisation allows shoppers to act with greater anonymity and impunity.”Beyond economics sits a more intimate psychological manoeuvre: self-forgiveness.“Research suggests consumers use neutralisation techniques to rationalise wrongdoing,” she said.“For example, consumers who fraudulently seek compensation may deny there is a victim, or consumers who fraudulently return products may deny that it is harming anyone or argue that their good behaviour outweighs this indiscretion.”Consumer ethics, in other words, have become elastic.Yet the justification lens does not exist in isolation. Many consumers are also reassessing whom they trust in the retail ecosystem.It’s clear that public scrutiny intensified in 2025 and beyond when the ACCC launched Federal Court proceedings against Woolworths and Coles over allegedly misleading “Prices Dropped” and “Down Down” price claims.Although the commission did not conclude that the supermarkets were “price gouging”, the inquiries raised concerns about the clarity of price promotions, margin practices and value transparency.These proceedings remain active, signalling ongoing regulatory oversight.In a cost-of-living environment already characterised by frustration, these developments have shaped how some consumers interpret fairness and, naturally by extension, how they rationalise their own behaviour.The paradox of protectionRetailers are leaning more heavily on facial recognition technology and advanced surveillance to counter rising crime, but with that comes a thorny balance between security and privacy.Retail crime is not just an Australian story, the issue is being felt across major markets and prompting diverse responses. In England and Wales, police recorded more than 519,000 shoplifting offences in the year to September 2025, a rise in theft and associated violence that has contributed to record losses of over £2.2 billion for British retailers and further investment in advanced theft deterrents such as AI-powered surveillance and real-time crime reporting platforms. In the United States, a 2025 National Retail Federation report highlights that retailer security leaders increasingly see theft and violence as strategic concerns, with coordinated crackdowns in places like Illinois leading to more than 400 arrests tied to organised retail theft across major chains. Globally, loss prevention investment is accelerating: the retail loss prevention market was valued at US $6.18 billion in 2025 and is forecast to grow rapidly as retailers adopt AI, IoT and other technologies to detect and deter theft at scale.Jonathan Brancato, managing associate at Armstrong Legal, told Inside FMCG many operators are struggling to “understand and balance their privacy obligations with customer expectations”.He noted the fundamentals remain non-negotiable, retailers must be clear about what data is being collected, how it’s collected, who can access it and why.As he put it, “Any data being collected should be stored safely to prevent unauthorised access and kept only for as long as it is needed.”While shoppers increasingly justify deviance, most still report feeling safe in retail environments. Only one in four visit centres more than once a week, and less than half say they have witnessed concerning behaviours, typically loitering or disruptive groups.The gap between this perception and the 21-year high in crime reveals the asymmetry of exposure.As Atto observed, “Based on other ACRS research that focuses on the perspective of retail staff, safety and security is a key issue being raised by this group. This is unsurprising, as retail staff are at shopping centres on a daily basis and may witness or be the victims of increasing retail crime.”This divergence in lived experience complicates the design of surveillance and prevention systems. Retailers are increasingly turning to AI-driven product verification, ID checks, exit gates and human oversight. Some measures, such as UK-style security pods, have cut shrinkage by nearly half.These asymmetries complicate how retailers design deterrence systems.But these protective layers also introduce their own tension. Customers may feel scrutinised, surveilled or pre-emptively treated as suspects.“Consumers may find the preventative measures listed to be reasonable to mitigate loss,” Atto said. “However, consumers feel differently about preventative measures that make them feel they are being unfairly monitored or targeted…Bunnings received backlash due to its implementation of facial recognition…Woolworths received backlash for the use of disguised staff.”Systems that protect can also provoke. Trust, already fragile, becomes a new battleground.Crisis response to safety cultureThe political momentum around crime intensified in November, with the ARA and NRA jointly backing a push to accelerate workplace protection orders and toughen penalties for assault.The ARA’s Rodwell framed the urgency plainly: “Retail crime is not a political issue – it’s a community safety issue, and an urgent one.”Yet even he warns that enforcement is not enough. “Without targeted enforcement and resourcing, the problem will not change on the ground,” the ARA has stated.Across other high-risk industries, such as aviation, mining and healthcare, the lesson is clear that safety matures when data is integrated.Systems prevent harm when they track patterns, assign accountability and ensure frontline reporting is frictionless.Retail is not yet operating at this level. Under-reporting remains widespread and responses differ sharply among stores; many workers carry the emotional toll alone.SafeWork NSW has long cautioned that “incident reporting is a vital process”, but the industry still lacks the co-ordinated intelligence to treat crime not as noise but as a signal.The opportunity, as 2026 begins, is to shift from incident response to systems thinking.Ethics as brand equityThe year ahead will demand that retailers professionalise risk in the same way they have professionalised logistics, loyalty and media.Boards will need to interrogate where harm is most concentrated in their networks, whether store design prioritises revenue over safety, and which technologies build trust rather than tension.A retailer known for calm, protected stores will be better placed to recruit and retain staff and to welcome younger consumers who are increasingly unwilling to tolerate harm as part of the retail exchange.But the long-term work is cultural.As Atto emphasised, “Changing macro factors, like culture, is no small feat but education or engagement that aims to create tighter-knit communities may be a step in the right direction.Shoppers who are more engaged with their local retailers may be less lenient on retail crime in their area.”The story of retail crime is, therefore, not only about loss, risk or enforcement, but about the social contract under strain, too.Moral fatigue, economic pressure and digital detachment have opened new grey zones but they also present an invitation.So how will retailers rebuild meaning, safety and fairness into the everyday ethics of shopping? The year 2026 may be about re-stitching the community around the retail crime crisis.This story was featured in the 2026 Outlook Report of Inside FMCG January edition.