Sneaky secret Bunnings uses to foil shoplifters
Although Bunnings sell security cameras to customers, their own security measures used to be far more hands-on, according to one former staff member.
In a recent TikTok video captioned "Bunnings secrets revealed by a former employee", a man who goes by the handle @relayscreations said when he worked at one of their stores in Queensland, they had a trick for warding off shoplifters.
@relayscreations #stitch with @princessannafit Bunnings Secrets revealed by a former employee #bunnings #australia #security #companysecrets #aussie ♬ original sound
"So I used to work at Bunnings. That is a chain of hardware stores if you're not Australian," he said. "When you're in Bunnings, you'll sometimes hear an announcement over the loudspeaker say something along the lines of 'security to section C, security to section C,' and the secret was that there was no section C."
"There was also, most of the time, no security. It was only meant to be a deterrent for shoplifters," he claimed. "So originally when we started doing it, we did it manually.
"Someone in the store would actually pick up the intercom and speak it but then they pre-recorded it and added it to the soundtrack of music that would play over the store speakers all day so we actually had the same announcements every day during the same songs and you predict them after you heard them for a while."
In a separate video, he said he stopped working at Bunnings in 2006, "so some of this information might be out of date."
This revelation was fascinating to Aussies on TikTok, though some noted they shopped at Bunnings all the time and had never heard those loudspeaker announcements.
Others claimed "all stores" including Woolies and Big W used this same trick.
"I work at Big W and we manually say it," one TikTok user commented. "Sometimes it's every couple hours or when there's people acting sketchy. It worked often."
A person claiming to have worked at Coles said, "We did this manually at Coles when we knew a five-finger discounter was in. We also got workers to follow them but make it look like we are working."
One person said they worked at Bunnings and "used to say it over the PA system back in 2003."
"Yep, did it at my old job 12 years ago. Nice to see it's still freaking people out," commented another person.