I have the same reaction whenever i find what i need… Locked away…
I leave
It was never about “theft.” That hyped “theft” up as a cover to hide their own inept management.
I walked into walmart to buy underwear and socks, they were all in lockup. I opened the amazon app on my phone, matched up the exact thing I wanted that was behind glass and it showed up at my house the next for for approximately the same price.
The fuck? I understand locking up stuff like booze, since that shit do be quite expensive, but fucking underwear?
underwear, deodorant, and toothpaste are commonly locked up where I’m from. it’s the most stolen stuff as it’s a basic need for the homeless
I think it’s just the next iteration of the detergent theft crap. Everyone needs socks and underwear; they’re stocked in bulk and are easy to resell.
Sounds like his job should be converted to an AI bot. This fucker makes how much money, and didn’t identify any of the problems that regular people in this thread easily identified? Turn his role into AI. Save the share holders his salary.
That’s what happens when you make so much money you no longer remember what it’s like to shop for necessities.
I can make thr same dumbass decisions for half the price.
Didn’t we finally realize that the whole “shoplifting epidemic” was all bullshit to cover up inept corprate management?
Yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/briefing/shoplifting-data.html
They overbuilt because if a competitor opened a store, they’d open on right next to it…
That strategy was never going to be profitable, they were trying to run competitors out of business.
Most of those stores were going. To close for one reason or another, the growth wasn’t sustainable but it made stock prices go up and then they had to invent a reason to close store that would keep stock prices high.
Yeah at some point the metric people used to value a stock was Square footage space, but that rule broke a long time ago.
Has absolutely nothing to do with prices being too high
There’s a retail strategy of putting products at your fingertips in the checkout aisle in order to entice you to buy it. Candy right next to you, so you’re munching on it when you leave the store. You feel good, they get money, no additional load on the staff.
This is, effectively, the opposite strategy. Make getting your hands on anything annoying and difficult, increase the number of floor clerks you need to constantly unlock the shelf, and generally make the retail experience slower and more unpleasant.
Both are correct. It’s too expensive AND it doesn’t help sales. There are no reps around to unlock the doors, why would you wait to buy?
I wonder if anyone considered installing a camera and a remote-triggered lock so a cashier, manager, or security person could just buzz someone in. All that crap is SUPER cheap now.
Target near me has all the booze locked up. They have a button you can press to get an employee to open the cases for you to buy something. I waited 10 minutes for someone to come and open up the case to buy a bottle of Campari. Nobody ever showed up. I wrote Target to tell them I’ll be looking elsewhere from now on for any item they keep in a case.
If they had more than 2 people working at a time it wouldn’t be a big deal
If they had more than 2 people working at a time
I don’t live in America but judging from what I heard, what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum? Like, I heard so many complaints of self-service checkouts having no one staff looking after them, which leads to customers going to manned tills instead, because they couldn’t deal with technical issues especially for the seniors. Then when a senior is asked if they want to use automated checkouts instead, they reply with the snarky response “I don’t work here.” You can’t blame people for being reluctant to use the self-service checkouts, if there are no help! Where I live, there is always a staff looking after the self-service checkouts because of the inevitable technical issues or customers not knowing how to use them.
My guess for this poor implementation of technology is because bosses think machines are meant to replace humans as workers, when realistically machines should help people with work. We don’t live in yet in a world where there are robots with the artifical intelligence as good as the human intelligence. And we are still way far from having robots with good dexterity skills as humans to completely replace us.
what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum
Before covid, they were just starving support staff slowly. A few automated checkouts, less hands on the floor than in the 90’s and the 00’s. You’d often have someone re-folding, re-organizing, and restocking at all times. in the 10’s it became more like staff during busy periods only.
When covid hit, the stores went to absolute operation bare minimum or even less. They figured out that they could literally put no one on the floor, stock and refill at night and profits boom. We’re seeing that across almost all industries. It’s like someone said, hey, have you tried just not providing any service at all AND raising prices. (e.g. health insurance) We should all be in the streets for blood, but we’re not. The idiots are bringing back the right wing, expecting them to care at all about their plight.
We are in a rather self-destructive area of capitalism. The top is expanding as fast and hard as they can. They are bleeding the lower and middle classes harder than they ever have before. I give it a year top before everything crashes and inflation puts us about on par with the lesser economies.
Well Kmart when they were still open, was doing this to drive the company into the ground so the CEO, who owned all the debt the company had personally, could sell the company for all the pieces, land ownership, brand ownership, production and shipping elements. Why other companies do it I can’t imagine why. You’d think all of them aren’t trying to do the exact same thing.
what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum?
It all comes back to money > humans in this fucked up country.
The business leaders don’t care about their customers. They will sell out the people they depend on if it makes the numbers 1% better. And then COVID taught them how they could make things even worse.
But then the rest of the people don’t have enough respect for the employees, other customers, or themselves to demand better.
You can’t blame people for being reluctant to use the self-service checkouts, if there are no help!
Much like with the locks on the storefronts, self-checkout is obnoxious in large part because the store owners don’t really trust you to swipe your own merchandise. The machines are constantly yelling at you for putting things on the wrong side of the machine or putting stuff in your basket before you finished checkout. And if you do anything wrong, the machine locks itself down so you can’t finish paying.
Why should you need help at a self-checkout? Its contrary to the very premise of the system.
I don’t typically have this issue at Walmart at least. Their self checkout is smooth and effective these days.
That said I still don’t use it, because it’s still shifting work to me without giving me compensation for it. If I got a discount for using the self checkout, sure, but I don’t. So I’ll keep using manned registers.
I’ve tried asking for help, but the person I find doesn’t work in that department and the assigned person doesn’t show up for like 30 minutes. It’s faster to drive across town to the store that doesn’t have my item behind glass.
I expect lighting, store position, lots of cameras, hidden security tags, diligent security and psychology would minimize losses and maximize the chances of catching people stealing items.
It’s organized theft rings with someone likely on the inside providing info. It’s not random people taking items because they’re broke.
I’m sure it’s all sorts - teams, meth heads, kids, desperates, employees whatever. These “loss prevention” units have to figure the best way to deter theft before it happens, detect theft when it happens, trespass / prosecute thieves, and minimize loss of sales all at once. It’s a difficult calculus I’m sure.
There are organized groups, but they mainly operate through removing and slap-tagging (placing an adhesive barcode for a cheap product over an expensive one).
Some of them get very specific. When I worked at a major outdoors chain, they’d get a $3,000+ Hummingbird sonar unit and put on a tag for a $100 Hummingbird unit, so the cashier would see the correct brand name pop up on the screen.
When I was a teenager I worked at a grocery store. We’d replace the cases of red Bull barcodes with tuna fish can barcodes and go through self checkout with it.
Retailers fault thinking they can save $ by automating away jobs.
I’m surprised the scale didn’t flag it
This was early self checkout
I ran out to Walmart to grab my kid some cough medicine. It was locked behind the cabinet and since it was later than 6pm they couldn’t unlock it and told me to come back tomorrow.
I will never go back to Walmart for medicine…
Retail will migrate even more to online shopping where it can’t be shoplifted
Then it’s just package theft
Yeah, but the company already has your money, so they don’t really care. Package theft is only a problem for us plebs to deal with.
Retail shopping for mundane items is a dead art.
Exactly - you see the little lock thing on the display and you’re like, aww shit I have to go find an employee, nevermind.
My Walmart has a little button to summon an employee. The last time (as in, both the most recent time and the final time) I went there at night to try getting diaper rash cream for my baby I pressed the button, and waited.
And waited.
Pressed the button again.
And waited.
Sunk cost fallacy. I’ve already waited so long, what if as soon as I walk away to find an employee somebody shows up?
After 10 minutes I went to find an employee stocking the shelves and told them what I needed. Their answer was “yeah, we saw you buzzed but we don’t know who has the key. If we find out we’ll have them open it for you.”
So I left .
I hate Walmart so much.
You guys know this article is about Walgreens, right?
It’s about sales losses due to keeping items behind locks at Walgreens. The person you replied to gave an anecdote of the identical problem at another retailer, in order to emphasize that this is a clear problem for both retailers and customers. It hardly seems irrelevant to the conversation?
“I don’t want to bother them, they’re busy”
And underpaid
And understaffed
And they’re people. Ever since automatic checkout, I can get out there without talking to a single soul.
Every single time I see it, I add it to my Amazon cart. It’s not great.
No shit.
No better way to kill brick and mortar than to make people interact more just to be able to pay you money for something.
Not brick and mortar but a couple of sports leagues I was involved in. “We shouldn’t make it hard for people to give us money”.
Honestly, the first thing i thought when hearing those measures was that it would only highlight how much more convenient online shopping is versus the store.
Well yeah… if you’ve got everything locked up you need to find one of the few staff left who is under far too much pressure to deal with customers.
It’s the fucking worst. Say I need a toothbrush, new mascara, and cough syrup. That’s gonna be at least 10 minutes waiting for the one overworked staff member to unlock the case at each of them.
A toothbrush? In the U.K. they’re like 2 quid …we’re actually gonna end up with people using Amazon for their shop for everything. It won’t end up with your weekly shopping trip being from the same place either.
They’re super cheap here too, but Walgreens at almost every location I’ve been to locks up absolutely everything
Must not have spread here yet. Last week i bought DayQuil, cough drops, pseudoephedrine. Nothing was locked up. The pseudoephedrine was behind the pharmacy counter
Preventing people from stealing toothbrushes is just evil. Nobody chooses to be in a situation where they even think about stealing a freaking toothbrush.
To be fair Walgreens happily marks a $1 brush up to $5
To be fair ….i live in a small town. I don’t tend to go other places and buy tooth brushes, but at the same time only expensive items are locked up.
Deodorant is the thing here
Also for some reason laundry detergent? Like, just get purex and be done with it, like $10 for a year supply.
Name brand laundry detergent has a decent resale price on the street. Tide was the first thing I noticed getting locked up at Family Dollar back in the 10s.
I found a wholesaler that sells a 5gal bucket of laundry detergent for $45, lasts probably 6 months.
We’re a small household with minimal laundry so 5 gallons is more like a 10 year supply for us… I’m here for it : D
From what I understand laundry detergent (especially Tide) is used as a black market currency because the value is relatively stable and everyone needs it eventually.
I read a few years ago that was because Tide was fairly high end as far as laundry detergents go.
That was pre-Tide pods too, so those must be like Louis Vuitton type shit these days.
This is more urban legend that fun fact.
