Waitrose Smart Cabinets Locking Champagne and Spirits Amid UK Store Robberies

Waitrose will put champagne bottles behind locked glass before the end of the year, as the supermarket steps up its fight against the relentless wave of shoplifting that has hit Britain’s high streets.

The chain owned by the John Lewis Partnership has told its 50,000 employees that it will roll out so-called “smart lockers” to protect premium spirits and champagne, marking one of the biggest signs that organized crime has begun to reach Britain’s supermarkets.

The cabinets, which are already being trialled at rivals including Sainsbury’s, often require shoppers to navigate through a multi-step process on a touchpad before the doors are released. Some retailers have gone even further, requiring customers to scan a loyalty card or enter a mobile phone number to gain access, creating a digital paper trail that can be referenced again if stock is lost. The technology can also record how long a cabin door has been open, flagging suspicious behavior such as emptying to staff in real time.

Waitrose declined to reveal the exact engineering of its system, but the move comes alongside a package of wider measures: protective “meat nets” joined by high joints, reinforced screens at cigarette counters to curb the growing habit of smoking, and the store-wide rollout of body-worn cameras.

In an internal interview with colleagues, Lucy Brown, director of the John Lewis Partnership of Central Operations, framed the investment as evidence that the business was “standing up” in the face of what she admitted was a “wave of retail crime and an epidemic of shoplifting”. He acknowledged the frustration felt by staff who watch thieves go unchallenged, but warned that intervention is rarely the safest option.

“It may sound like standing back is not what we do, but it’s not,” Ms. Brown wrote, urging colleagues to resist their “first instinct” to arrest suspects or fight stocks. Locking up “potentially volatile” people in front of other customers, he said, risks escalating an already tense situation.

The guide follows a bruising month for Waitrose’s public image. The retailer faced heavy criticism in April after firing Walker Smith, a 17-year veteran of the chain, who said he was fired for dealing with a burglar trying to make off with Easter eggs. The Partnership declined to comment on the details, citing employment confidentiality, but said it followed “due process” and pointed out the “significant risk to life of dealing with shoplifters”.

Jason Tarry, the chairman of John Lewis who joined Tesco last year, has since written in The Telegraph that the response to the crime wave was to insist that they “not encourage” staff to catch thieves themselves. Trained security personnel “will step in to challenge shoplifters,” he said, “but only if they are trained and safe to do so”.

The retreat from strong technology shows the scale of the problem facing British retailers. Industry group the British Retail Consortium has repeatedly warned that shoplifting has reached levels not seen in a generation, with costs to retailers running into billions and attacks on shop staff on the rise. For a chain like Waitrose, whose brand has long traded on a comfortable, customer-trusted shopping experience, the optics of placing Bollinger behind a touchscreen-controlled glass door represents a significant cultural shift.

A John Lewis spokesperson confirmed the move: “We are currently investing in a range of advanced technologies, including smart anti-theft technology. As part of this we plan to pilot lockable smart cabinets in areas such as spirits and champagne soon. We already use smart shelf technology in our health, beauty and spirits areas, which can sense unusual customer behavior, so this provides security.”

For British SME retailers, who don’t have the money to run similar programs, the message from Waitrose is a sad one. If a chain of its size and the use of security has come to the conclusion that its most valuable stock now needs to be locked up, what an unlicensed independent store or a local store has is really uncomfortable.