Yeah, I end up still using their pharmacy because the pharmacist is just a great guy and he takes care of people. But the rest of the store can fuck right off.

That's like years ago, like 2016, I went to Walmart for the last time. They closed all the self checkout lanes, but I guess forgot to rehire cashiers. So I waited 30 minutes in line on a random weekday to buy one 50ft extension cord.

Fun fact, next time you need something like that on the road just find a Dollar General. There's one approximately every nine feet (they're the retailer with the most locations in the US, bar none) and Dollar General don't give a fuck, therefore nothing is locked up there. Some stuff is behind the checkout counter, but that's all. Dollar General also doesn't care about you stealing the nail clippers, nor paying any employees to be present, nor much of anything else as far as I can tell.

Took me 25 minutes to buy a $4 brake light bulb at wal mart one night. After tracking down an employee to track down another employee to meet me by the glass door. I'll never buy car bulbs there again. That portion of store is dead to me.

I honestly wonder, is it illegal to simply unlock those things, if you have no intention of actually stealing from them? It's not like they use particularly high security locks. You can probably buy some simple lock raking or cylinder lock tools.

Is it actually violating a law to unlock one of those cases if you don't have any intention of actually stealing something?

A simple solution would be a buzzer system that calls an employee to your aisle. But if an employee has the option of meeting shelf stocking or some other target, or spending time helping a customer, which isn’t as easily tracked and doesn’t look as good on a chart when bosses look at it, which do you think that they’ll choose?

My local petrol station has the same person stocking shelves as serving customers a lot of the time, it creates a right nightmare situation.

Just making shit up so they have something to point to when the investors wonder why number didn’t go up enough.

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.

"I don't want to bother them, they're busy"

Every single time I see it, I add it to my Amazon cart. It's not great.

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.

paywalled

Headline is right.
'When you lock things up…you don't sell as many of them’

Reminder, using the reader function in Firefox skips almost all pay walls.

Archive copy of the Fortune article: https://archive.is/PoraP

Thank you! It wasn't paywalled on my end and I wonder if it activates on traffic.

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.

ny times links are cancer.

I can't read what that article says, I don't pay for news.

I've known people who just do their regular shopping at those stores. I'll never understand why.

I walked into Walgreens on last Christmas (365+days ago) to get something on the way to a gathering, a half gallon of milk was $7.99. They must have upped all the prices to be kind to their customers on Christmas day

Exactly I gets over the counter kind cheaper at my local grocery store then at Walgreens.

If theft is this bad, these stores should just switch back to the traditional model used by pharmacies and general stores. Consider this photo of a traditional pharmacy:

Or this old general store:

This is what these businesses used to look like. In traditional pharmacies and general stores, most goods were kept behind counters or at the very least within direct view of those behind counters. A traditional dry good store might literally just be a big counter in the front with a huge warehouse in the back. You show up with a list of goods you want, and the clerk would run into the back and grab everything you wanted.

The model of a store with aisles that customers wander through is not the historical norm. As industrialization improved, the relative costs of goods lowered, while the relative cost of labor increased. So it made sense for stores to accept a higher level of theft and shopliting by offloading the item-picking process to their customers. They got the customers to do a lot of the work for them, but in exchange they accepted a higher level of theft.

Now they're trying to have things both ways. They still want customers to do all the work of picking out their purchases from the shelves, but they've decided they don't like the level of shoplifting that level of low labor cost business inevitably produces. They want the customers to do most of the labor of clerks, but they don't want to accept the level of theft that inevitably produces.

Several of the Walmart locations near me do this as well, now. One of them locks up diapers and baby formula, deodorant, shaving products, cough and allergy medications, basically all of their cosmetics department, the entirety of the tools department, most of paints, and all of electronics except for some reason the DVD's. This is in addition to the usual stuff that's under lock and key like the jewelry counter, ammo, and knives.

As a result, as if I didn't already need a reason, I just don't go there anymore.

Retailers have consistently made retail shit, and then they turn around and whine that they're losing money because everyone is shopping online. Well, this is surely another part of it. What customer is going to stand around waiting for one of the three employees you have left in the store find the keys and unlock the cabinet to buy a fucking can of shaving cream and perp walk them to the checkout so they can pay right then and there versus just having Amazon deliver it tomorrow without the hassle?

And thus, Amazon takes over another few square feet of the world.

I've been thinking about opening a regular corner store, but without having a ton of superfluous junk like all these other stores have. Like one or two options for a toothbrush, a few options for toothpaste, etc. Basically just the more popular stuff that people want to buy and make it easy for them to actually buy it. Maybe even offer a drive up window so you can grab a few things on your way home. People will pay good money to avoid Walmart and also for convenience.

Reminds me of getting the guy to unlock the video game and he hands me the game thinking we are gonna go ring it up, and I am just standing reading the back of the case, only to put it back and ask for another one.

Just ends up being me and Walmart bro shopping for a game together

It's a tremendous pain the ass buying vegetarian vitamins because I need to see the ingredients... On the back of the box, behind a locked door.

Sometimes the keywarden just waits there while I read through a bunch of them.

I go bonkers trying to pick what version of a tool I want at home Depot, you usually can't even pick them up anymore, they're hard bolted to the display.

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".

The fuck? I understand locking up stuff like booze, since that shit do be quite expensive, but fucking underwear?

Yeah, I'm sure a lot of what they assume is shoplifting is actually internal. That's going to happen if companies don't pay their employees enough to cover food and rent.

@makyo It might have been done for that reason, to help track shrinkage. A kind of trouble-shooting.

The one employee in the entire store is busy at checkout. I'm just gonna order it on Amazon.

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.

I was gonna say, this level of theft is possible because of the number of people in the store that care if that store is stolen from.

At a Mom&Pop shop, there's only one person behind the counter, but they have free time to ask how someone's doing when they pick up something they intend to steal. Plus, any other customers in the place are relatively loyal, and not of the "stand around" variety. At a big chain store, there's two employees doing the job of five that can barely even point someone to an aisle, and not a single customer cares if the CEO bleeds out in an alleyway.

That's horrible and CVS deserves to lose your business, butI promise you that, unless it was the store manager you told, that employee absolutely did not care and didn't tell anyone who did care. That's just a consequence of divorcing ownership of businesses from employment. I swear to you that no normal employee of a national chain has ever been impacted by being told by a customer that they're taking their business elsewhere. If anything people should write letters to corporate, not let a low level employee with no interest in the company know.

I’d never order from CVS online anyway. They’re too expensive. The only reason to go there or Walgreens is they’re open 24hr

Why didn't the one clerk just help you with all your locked up needs?

Lol what kind of sucker goes to cvs ;)

Not everyone is rich enough to pay 10x prices on everything

What do you suggest the stores do to curb theft? I'm being serious too? Just ignore it?

The wiz?

De Kijkshop

I wish the pharmacy was still owned by the pharmacist

I can make thr same dumbass decisions for half the price.

That's what happens when you make so much money you no longer remember what it's like to shop for necessities.

Fun thing is that you could probably make an AI say they need more locking or none at all. There's coherent words toward either strategy, and LLMs only care about making coherent words. So I guess just like most CEOs...

Not as much as you would guess. Managers are the most likely source of serious theft, but at the same time, they are usually being paid $70k-$100k a year and typically have bonus agreements where if the stores profits go up in a financial quarter they get a payout, and there's a lot of store managers getting more money from their bonus than their payroll, so to motivate theft you need a VERY greedy manager who is going to get more than 6 figures from the scheme or he's risking his job for less money than his job pays anyway. The most common method is falsified sales, that's gonna get him his bonus when he knows he's not hitting metrics and was really expecting the payout. I've seen a few managers get caught on this. Next you have the more complex attempts, like filling in fake data for large ticket item deliveries or printing out delivery sheets with no sale in the system at all, then you have the delivery to a known place and you keep the high ticket items and sell them out otherwise profit off the delivery, this can go on for some time before it becomes evident. Sometimes there's smaller scams like the Walmart managers that were cashing out giftcards, putting them back on the shelf and 100% getting away with it because Walmarts system was probably out of date with modern standards. Then you have the wild schemes like getting free mech from vendors, returning that mech in the system before inventory and getting yourself fired for petty theft before anyone figures out you have stolen several million dollars in comped merchandise that never existed in the first place so no one's even looking for it. Being fired for theft is a nice master touch, because it caused a ton of confusion when they bring the charges to police. Who are easily confused. But you know. It's not ALL management and a lot of high theft items are too cheap to be internal theft, spray paint, exacto knives, cheap earbuds, usually it's a ''I can't get past the ID check'' type of theft.

Idk, theft was pretty rampant at some of my local stores, not quite as bad lately. I've personally witnessed a few people steal from my local grocery store in the last year or two. My local Home Depot was even worse until their security guard shot a guy and they rearranged the checkout lanes. Now in order to go through the exit you have to go through a long corridor of self checkout lanes with several employees. And I'd probably be less likely to rob a place if I'd heard their security guard shot a guy.

It's definitely about theft. Hard to manage that away.

Walmarts are doing this with things like cosmetics in some areas too, though at least in the one I frequent they have a checkout counter and clerk in the immediate vicinity. Not sure it won't still frustrate the honest people who have lots of other options.

Hey now. Don't you dare put our oligarch's wealth in even the slightest bit of jeopardy.

I'd be okay with them forming this takeaway, but I think there were indications that the thieves were generally pretty well-off; it was often organized groups stealing and selling the goods by value rather than individuals in need of those specific things.

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?

Then it's just package theft

Retail shopping for mundane items is a dead art.

It’s organized theft rings with someone likely on the inside providing info. It’s not random people taking items because they’re broke.

Perhaps somewhat

Same and I don't even shoplift. I feel like interacting with a human should not be required in order to go shopping. I just want to grab my stuff in peace, check it out myself, and go.

Same reason why I ignore the receipt checkers. I just walk on by. Unless you're at Costco, they're not going to stop you.

...to steal it?