Festive season for Kleptomaniacs!

HYDERABAD: A quick glance to her sides after an endless wait, she breaks the security tag — a magnetic strip standing between her and her favourite apparel — with sweaty palms. A self-congratulatory pat follows, as she heads to the exit with the apparel stashed away in her handbag, fake contempt written all over her face for the collections on display. Beep!!Beep!!But alas the alarm goes off just as she thought she had made good her ‘harmless’ burglary. Even before she puts across her most innocent frown, a bunch of guards envelop her to rip apart her handbag.  Welcome to the world of a kleptomaniac. Be it removing tags, interchanging clothes in the trial room or just walking through the exit, they shoplift like there’s no tomorrow.  “Youngsters are the ones who mostly get involved in such acts,” says a store official with Max at the City Centre Mall. “The sad part though is that they hail from good families. The urge to steal a dress or two, is like a disease,” the official says. A recent survey, The Global Retail Theft Barometer 2011, proves the point. It puts India right on top in retail shrinkage (loss to business due to internal, external & supply chain/transit theft) for the fifth year running, at an annual loss of `3470 crore.  “For the boys, it’s the need to impress girlfriends with gifts, while for women it could be the appeal of certain costly items,” opines Reena, store manager at Archies Gallery, GVK Mall. She recounts an incident where a boy was caught stealing some jewellery. “He ended up pleading with me not to embarrass him, since his girlfriend was waiting outside.” She further describes how even children were caught carrying toys in pockets. “We can’t take action, since adults brush it off as a child’s prank”, she points out.  With shoplifting on the rise (almost 3-4 per month on an average), most stores have been forced to invest more on security systems. Admits Rachna of Secure Ideas, a company dealing in digital security solutions, “The demand for CCTVs, face recognition and tag detectors has risen by 100% with malls and retail stores topping the list.” Besides CCTVs, stores also have guards in mufti.Also the norm nowadays is to station a guard outside the trial rooms. Such a move helped Max catch a lady recently who was seen leaving wearing a new pair of jeans below her older pair.“We make the culprits pay up to 10 times the original price, but since the customer was from a reputed family, we let her leave,” Max staffers recall.