A host of small retailers have highlighted the impact of shoplifting on their businesses, as the cost of retail crime continues to soar.

Real Eating Company founder Helena Hudson reported losing £425 worth of sales after one thief stole all of the prepared food from a fridge near the door to her store, The Times reported.

Wholesaler Cotswold Fayre MD Paul Castle said it had “paid a fortune” to install CCTV cameras across its two sites, and had resorted to hiring additional shop floor workers to deter theft.

“I think the independent sector is always going to get hit harder than the multiples, because we don’t have as many security guards and all of the barriers,” said Castle.

In December, it was reported that owner of Cornwall-based gift shop Happy Piranha, Martin Gaunt, had made more than 50 citizen’s arrests in two years across his three shops and a cafe.

Gaunt said: “We take a fairly zero-tolerance approach to it and we tend to stop most people that we see — and if necessary, we’ll use the citizen’s arrest route.

“We went through a period where out of the seven that we stopped, five of them were actually carrying some form of weapon.”

The three executives said they believed the police weren’t taking, or able to take, much action to help them.

The complaints comes as the British Retail Consortium’s (BRC) annual crime survey found customer theft increased over 20% to £2.2bn during the year to August, pushing the total cost of crime in the sector to almost £4.2bn.

The trade association warned that retail crime was “spiralling out of control” despite more being spent on prevention than ever before.

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