Retailers already face a complex range of safety risks including customer aggression, manual handling, slips, trips and falls, and working with plant and equipment.
Now, even lower margins are compounding this situation, with scarce resources for dedicated safety activities or personnel and shifts running on skeleton crews with minimal supervision. At the busiest times, stores can be run by part-time or casual employees under pressure, sometimes resulting in shortcuts to get the job done. Training a mixture of full-time, part-time and casual staff to be safe can also be a huge challenge.