ABSTRACT
All commerce depends on trust between strangers (Fukuyama, 1995). Trust is an abstract idea that has evolved over hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, its role in market economies clearly identified by Adam Smith, the first to truly understand market economies: ‘Mankind brought together in a mutual Intercourse of good Offices’ (Smith, 1996: xliv). By ‘trust’ we mean that, in any commercial exchange, each party to the exchange will reciprocate. In a typical retailing situation the problem of trust is theoretically reinforced by a face-to-face exchange between the buyer and seller. There are many assumptions of trust in this simple exchange. For example, there are assumptions that the product purchased does or is what the seller says it is, that it is ‘safe’, that the seller in fact is a genuine representative of the retailer or manufacturer, and so on. The buyer guarantees that the money he or she hands over is not counterfeit. These and many other assumptions are familiar aspects of retailing. Retailers and manufacturers try their best to overcome the problem of being strangers to their customers by advertising their products and services so that they become ‘household names’, offering trusted products so that buyers will enter a store they can trust. There are also many ways in which the assumption of trust is abused. Shoplifters will try to acquire an item without paying, often taking advantage of the inviting displays of items shopkeepers use to entice customers. Retailers and manufacturers may use deceptive advertising to create a false sense of familiarity with the product. There is, therefore, a constant tension between the maintenance of trust on the part of both buyers and sellers, and the attempts by each party to come out the ‘winner’ from the exchange: the buyer wants to pay as little as possible for a high quality article, and the seller wants to sell as much product at the highest price that the market will sustain. This tension provides the situational context within which crime prevention analysts have traditionally focused their efforts: surveillance to prevent shoplifting, tamper-proof packaging, careful arrangement of product displays, tagging or marking of products, monitoring of inventory, attention to lighting and other architectural aspects of the retail floor.
