The store in my neighborhood thought it wise to lock up the fancy Italian coffee beans. I’m absolutely sure it will not stem theft and will absolutely decrease sales. The bags are big - these are the 1kg bags - so I’m fairly sure most of the theft that is happening is internal anyway.
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.
Stopped at my local Best Buy the other day. Needed an SSD that was locked behind glass. After attempting to get help for a half hour I ordered one on eBay from the parking lot and drove home. I’ve honestly tried to support brick and mortar where I can but I give up.
Retail will migrate even more to online shopping where it can’t be shoplifted
Retail shopping for mundane items is a dead art.
I’ve found that for a lot of groceries, the online shopping prices are just absurd compared to the in-store grocery store pricing.
For gadgets and such, online is pretty good still, though a maddening amount of crappy knock offs to wade through…
Online groceries are rough ATM. Other countries manage it. We need online-only grocers that just have stockrooms and they need competition. We’ll never be able to comparatively pay shoppers to shop our food in regular markets, it takes hours and at minimum wage, that’s not ideal.
If someone makes automation around it, that would be pretty slick.
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.
I have the same reaction whenever i find what i need… Locked away…
I leave
The one employee in the entire store is busy at checkout. I’m just gonna order it on Amazon.
Yeah, “I’ll just Amazon it” is becoming a more common phrase. It’s cheap. The delivery is surprisingly fast.
Downside is you’re making one of our wealthiest oligarchs even more powerful.
And, of course, it could be stolen off your doorstep before you can even get to it.
Don’t forget how it’s becoming more and more likely you’ll just get a counterfeit.
Ehh, I mean if you were gonna buy it from CVS/Walgreen’s, they aren’t exactly an altruistic alternative…
I agree, best to avoid the wealthy oligarchs, but sometimes you need medicated allergy eye drops and Bob’s Corner Store doesn’t have them.
Totally agree. I’m no saint. I’ve purchased from Amazon. But the last election showed us that Bezos is very much not our friend. I’ll be damned if I give that leech another Amazon Prime subscription.
Has absolutely nothing to do with prices being too high
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.
Or machine vision to track item pickups and follow the person around the store and out. You may need a cover over the items to have them pause to lift a plastic cover to give the system enough to confidently note that person X has collected item Y and placed it in cart/pocket/prison pocket.
Nearfield (NFC) was supposed to do this. I was supposed to be able to fill a cart and just push it out the store and be charged.
Yeah I remember an at in the 90s of rolling a shopping cart without scanning and here we are 30 years on… Still scanning…
Well, it’s not NFC but Amazon has some convenience stores that can do it, I think there’s a limit on the number of items though.
I can just imagine a shopping cart full of NFC transceivers screaming out there serial numbers simultaneously.
I’ve seen convenience stores that have a buzzer that turns on (very, VERY annoying buzzer) whenever someone opens up the liquor fridge in their store. This signals that someone is picking up some beer. It cannot be avoided. You want to be quick to get what you want and not have your ears buzzed off, but shoplifting alcohol is really hard that way. You can get it quick anyway.
e a buzzer that turns on
I’ve seen that before, but it was a LONG time ago. Very effective for small stores.
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.
10 minutes for a bottle of alcohol? That’s bullshit. I’ve never seen a place where the liquor is locked up near me.
Yup. It’s TOTAL bullshit. I felt like I was in some place like Pakistan where they keep the booze locked up and you have to tell them how many Units you require and then they go and get it for you. But worse, because they never fucking get it for you at lockup Target.
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.
Durrrr
Meanwhile, my local Walmart is expanding their caged goods selection and they have been removing call buttons.
Its time to invest in vending machines.
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.
In Germany, pharmacies look like that today.
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Like cannabis dispensaries…
Yup. For whatever reason (likely regulations), most dispensaries are set up a lot like traditional general stores. Everything behind the counter.
I think it’s a security thing. Add in the whole “all cash business” thing, and it’s no surprise that I see armed security inside sometimes.
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
ny times links are cancer.
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.
Case in point, my Nephew once worked for Target in what used to be their flagship store in the area. Several years ago they opened a new flagship store literally 2.9 miles up the road. As the crow flies I think it’s closer to 1.5. This wasn’t a move. They left both stores open. They’re still both open to this day.
Management immediately started bitching at all the low level employees that they weren’t “hitting numbers” anymore as if the cashiers or stockers had anything to do with this. Uh, dickhead, you cannibalized your own business because now 100% of the people who live in the direction of the new store aren’t going to drive right past it to come here; they’re going to go to the new store instead. You didn’t make the pie any bigger, all you did was take the same pie and slice it in half.
I don’t know how many millions of dollars it cost them to build, stock, and staff that new store for no goddamn reason whatsoever.
I can’t read what that article says, I don’t pay for news.
It’s a catch 22… literally. If they don’t lock it up, half the shit would be gone within days. I’ve seen it. I work part time in merchandising, my CVS and Walgreens stores have people coming in ALL THE TIME, grabbing shit from the shelves and running out. It’s fucking frustrating.
Despite all the effort spent prosecuting it, there’s virtually no concrete evidence that retail theft — organized or otherwise — is on the rise. Data on retail theft provided to law enforcement and lawmakers comes exclusively from corporate retailers, or organizations funded by them, and is not independently vetted. Last year, the National Retail Federation was forced to retract its claim that organized retail theft cost its members “nearly half” of the $94.5 billion in lost inventory in 2021. One researcher put the actual figure closer to 5%.
Just making shit up so they have something to point to when the investors wonder why number didn’t go up enough.
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 I mean I wasn’t buying disposable razors for $40 anyway, but TBH nobody should be. Even if that wasn’t a profit-driven overprice, it’s still a stupidly wasteful use of titanium.
Now I wonder if the current popularity of beards hasn’t been at least partially due to this policy.
Perhaps somewhat
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”.
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.
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…
LLMs are not the only form of AI. They’re just the one that’s most visible to the public right now
But they are the only sort that would be applicable to the suggestion of “replace CEO with AI” today.
They quite literally would not be.
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.
I have gone to a local electronics store, Best Buy, several times in the last few years because I wanted something immediately only to be stopped at the last moment by a locked shelf and no one around to unlock it. What the fuck are you even supposed to do there? Scream and shout until someone arrives? Quietly stalk an employee until you find your moment to strike? I just fucking leave, I’ll wait for shipping.
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.
My walmart has buzzers but they ignore them.
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 went looking for a new cabin air filter since I had a gift card. The auto employee had literally no clue what I was talking about and just pointed at the wall of air filters with a shrug. Five seconds in an O’Reilly and I was on the way home
Same thing for me with a $10 headlight. Last time I needed one they weren’t locked up, so that was an unpleasant discovery. The employee was super busy with other customers, so I don’t blame him one bit.
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?
lol that’s way too much effort to give your hard earned money to a shitty company
I avoid Best Buy like the plague, I can’t even remember the last time I went there, maybe 5 years ago? I went to buy a monitor and had to pass like 3 fucking security checks and a receipt checker.
The whole experience was so off putting, I just never went back.
I bought some Beats Solo Buds right after Christmas. I had a trip upcoming and couldn’t wait for shipping so I looked at Best Buy and they said my local store had them. After waiting 20min for them to not find the right model or colour I went across the street to Target and bought them there, which still took at too long.
I order everything usually and my trial back in brick and mortar revealed it’s only gotten worse now.
The last thing I tried to buy at Best Buy they simply didn’t have in stock, despite their in store computer system and their web site insisting they had dozens of the damn things. Never mind getting someone to unlock the case; I couldn’t have bought it for any price no matter how badly I wanted it. I gave up. I haven’t been back since.
Microcenter is pretty much the only brick-and-mortar electronics/computers store left that’s worth a damn, which is convenient because they’re also pretty much the only one left, period. Too bad they have barely any locations compared to Best Buy.
A few years back bought something at Best buy and they asked if I needed a receipt or was I ok with just getting it emailed. I said I didn’t need a receipt. Then I was stopped at the door because I didn’t have a receipt, and they had to get the cash register person to vouch for me.
To their credit, for a gift card so I bought something there this past weekend and it was pretty much frictionless. Walked by the guy at the door with the product and no receipt or anything and didn’t signal at me.
Walmart near me on the other hand has an interesting strategy. If I am carrying stuff in a bag, no problem. But if I skipped the bag, they ask to see my receipt. So guess you just need a plastic Walmart bag to shoplift…
You actually don’t need to show them the receipt if you’ve already purchased the goods. It’s your property now and they can get fucked. I do it all the time.
Is it actually violating a law to unlock one of those cases if you don’t have any intention of actually stealing something?
It probably is.
My state has a definition in its shoplifting statute that includes tampering with packaging, removing tags, or defeating security devices even if the product does not leave the store. I’m sure others do as well. Technically they could probably bust you even if the very next thing you did was take the thing to the checkout and pay for it. Not worth it, in my opinion. Just buy from someone who doesn’t pull that shit and let that good old fashioned Free Market Economy these chucklefucks love so much take care of it.
You can actually just buy whatever keys you need online. When I worked in retail it was a major issue. Groups of thieves would come in and hand off the key to multiple people so each could go grab stuff from different areas.
Technically it would be trespassing, since you’re entering an area you’re not authorized to enter, but no damages, assuming you don’t like break the lock or something.
You’re not likely to get sued for nominal damages (one dollar) for a technical trespass. They might ask you to leave. If you have a key and nobody is around, go for it. The keys are generic.
