대형마트에서의 상점절도(Shoplifting)

An Exploratory Study of South Korean Shoplifting

Studies concerned with shoplifting in South Korea are very sparse Using both a quantitative and qualitative method, this study attempted to answer to the questions such as who shoplifts and when, how, and what The results were discussed with the existing literatures The major findings in this study are as follows, there was a higher proportion of adolescent and female shoplifters than adult and male shoplifters When female and male as a team shoplifted, they turned out to be a professional shoplifter with prior records Of the shoplifters who was detected by a security officer, 77.2% were students of house wives Unemployed persons were 10.3% Although the majority of house wives were motivated to steal items for her use in every day life, some appeared to be propelled by psychological problems The internal theft was comprised of 5.1% of the shoplifters A higher rate of shoplifting occurrences included a weekend or a late afternoon And a method of hiding stolen items inside a bag was most frequently used Interestingly, some shoplifters had attempted to go out after wearing a new clothing/shoes or eating foods in the store Others had put the items into a cashier's desk after attaching a cheaper price tag into an expensive item The shoplifters targed mostly foods, clothing, and electronics It was also revealed that the most frequent detecting method by security officers was CCTV monitoring(61.8%) and the second most frequent use was to security officer's own encounter with a shoplifting in progress Only 11% of those detected were officially transferred to the police and the remaining cases were informally resolved in the hypermarket