Behind the Counter: Rethinking Safety Amid Retail Violence

If you take the eighty-twenty rule, twenty percent of your stores cause eighty percent of your problems. If you go hard on that cohort first, you'll see a natural reduction in those events.

- Michael Plunkett

About this session

Retail crime has stopped looking like isolated shoplifting. Gang-related incidents, staff-targeted abuse, and events like the Bondi Junction attack have pushed customer aggression to the top of the safety agenda for public-facing businesses everywhere.

In this session, host Craig Bleakley sits down with Michael Plunkett, Head of Safety at Kmart & Target, to unpack what's actually driving the rise and how a business with over 450 stores across Australia and New Zealand is responding.

Plunkett shares the data behind this rising trend, the store-level changes that make a measurable difference, and where the limits of technology and process still leave frontline teams exposed.

The new retail risk map

The numbers tell the story: over 90% of New Zealand retailers report crime every year, and weapons-involved retail crime in Australia is up 66%. Across the globe, England and Wales also reported record-high shoplifting offences last year.

Although acknowledging there are many factors involved in the violence spike, Plunkett points to three main drivers behind the trend:

• Economic pressure. Rising cost of living pushes some customers into situations they wouldn't otherwise be in.
• Community-level issues. Drug and alcohol problems and homelessness show up directly in-store, especially near transport hubs.
• Slower emergency response. Police can't attend every incident, so retailers can't rely on that as a first line of defence anymore.

Incidents like Bondi Junction in 2024, where a mass stabbing at a Sydney shopping centre left multiple people dead, forced a hard look at retail readiness. Kmart Group found their stores couldn't all lock down quickly, so they rolled out a simple fix: a coded lockbox at every store entrance, giving managers immediate control.

Michael flags this as a genuine culture shift. A decade ago, locking a store mid-trade would have been frowned on. Now it's standard practice.

Safety design and the limits of technology

As customer threatening situations rose, Kmart adopted a clear rule for store changes: pilot, measure, then scale.

Kids were riding display bikes around stores, knocking stock off shelves. The fix: lock the bikes to their display units. Customers can still touch them, just not push them around.

The same pilot-first approach shaped a knife packaging redesign after a widely reported stabbing at a supermarket in Queensland prompted the retailer to pull kitchen knives from shelves nationwide, and a retraining push for customer greeters, the first line of threat detection in every store.

Technology plays its part too. Body-worn cameras are effective with customers who are still thinking clearly. Seeing their own face on screen is often enough to end a dispute before it escalates.

For a harder cohort of impaired or highly agitated customers, Kmart leans on a different layer: partnerships with local police and council teams who already know the repeat offenders in the area.

Key takeaways from this session

1. Profile your stores before you spend on them. Not every store carries the same risk. Kmart's national risk profiling exercise lets them target investment where it actually reduces incidents, rather than spreading it evenly.

2. Being "match fit" beats hesitation. A decade ago, locking a store mid-trade was frowned upon. Now it's standard. The lesson: build the capability to act fast, and normalise using it.

3. The mental health cost is often invisible until you look for it. Kmart's "continuum of mental health" approach targets team members in the middle of the curve, not just those already in crisis, on the logic that early intervention beats trying to fix things once someone's already struggling.

4. Reporting culture is generational. Younger staff tend to report more and tolerate less; longer-serving staff can start treating verbal abuse as "part of the job." Left unaddressed, that gap quietly skews the data retailers rely on to know where the real risk sits.