I’ve come to realise that everything requires hard choices… 

Getting up and going to the gym at 6am is hard.

But so is suffering from ill health in later life.

The question is, which ‘hard’ will I choose?

I spent last weekend knee-deep in DIY. New flooring, fresh paint, the lot.

It’s the kind of job that seems simple when you start and somehow eats up an entire weekend (and your patience).

At one point, I decided to ask AI how to paint neat edges without getting marks on the skirting board.

It confidently told me to use painters’ tape. So, I did… and the paint on my walls came off with it.

That’s when I remembered what I already knew: there’s no shortcut for doing a job properly.

You can go for the quick fix, or you can take the time to get it right. Both are hard, but only one lasts.

And it struck me how often that same choice shows up in my world of retail crime and policing.

This week, I read an article about calls for tougher sentencing for shoplifters. I get where that’s coming from: the frustration is real. Offending rates are up, violence against retail staff is rising, and communities are fed up.

But we can’t punish our way out of every problem. Especially not when prisons are at capacity and we’re struggling to recruit enough police officers to keep up.

As upset as the police may be getting about pressure on statistics by virtue of a greater propensity to report business crimes, we still know that under-reporting is chronic in some parts of the retail industry. Take supply chain, for example.

At the recent On The Move conference by Retail Risk, official figures for annual supply chain loss were challenged. According to official statistics, supply chain loss costs retail £100 million per year. But as one retailer pointed out, that £100 million was roughly what they alone lost annually. So either no one else is losing stock, or the official figures are way off.

After some debate, everyone agreed that at an absolute minimum, supply chain loss is costing retailers £1 Billion a year… and probably twice that. So much for official statistics.

That tells you two things. First, that the problem runs far deeper than what we can see on paper. And second, that we can’t rely on surface-level solutions to fix systemic issues.

It’s easy to say “make sentences tougher.” It’s harder to build prevention systems that work.

To invest in technology like live facial recognition that actually stops crime before it happens and support rehabilitation and diversionary schemes that reduce reoffending… Those things take time, structure, and leadership.

But just like my DIY weekend, if you don’t take the time to do it right, you’ll be back fixing the same problem again in six months.

The truth is, everything worth doing is hard. So you might as well choose the version of hard that actually moves things forward, whether that’s a well-painted wall, a safer store, or a justice system that finally starts working smarter instead of just getting tougher.