Coles is instructing staff to “assist” customers with scanning larger items before other groceries at its self-serve checkouts as part of a series of measures designed to help prevent theft amid the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.

The supermarket chain has been rolling out upgrades to in-store technology to stem rising rates of shoplifting, which increased 20 per cent in the 2022-23 financial year. The measures include upgrading self-checkout terminals to embed “bottom of trolley” technology, which detects when a customer has a larger item and prompts them to scan it. The technology has been rolled out across at least 187 stores.

Skip-scan technology, which detects and shows a top-down video recording of a customer scanning or failing to scan an item, has also been implemented in 346 stores. Meanwhile, smart gates, which slide open when a customer has paid for their groceries, have been rolled out in 286 stores, according to Coles’ latest quarterly documents.

Multiple Coles workers confirmed to the Retail and Fast Food Workers Union that team members were “expected” to offer customers help with scanning bulky items first and that the expectations are tied to company metrics.

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“They have an expectation of 50 per cent [assistance] for team members,” said one worker who requested anonymity. Another said: “They have a matrix that they are comparing to other stores. Our store is always in trouble for having the lowest compliance.”

A different Coles staffer said some co-workers were feeling additional pressure and “guilt-tripped” from failing to meet these targets. “The service manager posts daily updates in the group chat of bulk-scan results percentages. Daily reports. This way, one can find out if they were the person working when ‘bulk’ percentages were low,” they said.

“Sometimes, bulk will be going through at two [check-out] machines at the same time, and it’s impossible to be in two places at once. So, in that case, bulk is missed, and the report that gets posted doesn’t recognise this.”

Coles said in a statement that its team members were encouraged to help customers where possible.