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”.
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.
Last time I went to cvs (competitor to Walgreens), 3 different things I wanted were locked up. It took me too long to get someone 3 fucking different times to unlock it. On the last one I told the employee next time I’m just going to order online and might not be from cvs. Treat me like a kid or a criminal and I’ll take my business elsewhere
Why didn’t the one clerk just help you with all your locked up needs?
I went in for 1 thing. Ended up remembering I needed a couple more. Not everything is some check list master plan
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
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.
Lol what kind of sucker goes to cvs ;)
Not everyone is rich enough to pay 10x prices on everything
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.
If they had more than 2 people working at a time it wouldn’t be a big deal
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.
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.
Self-service stuff is utter crap for any number of reasons. I had to call staff multiple times (thankfully they are staffed where I live) on some trips. It is fucking stupid. They don’t make things faster or easier. They just make them annoying.
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.
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.
My local market was the WORST. They still use the scale version. They’ve shut down all but one register. So if you get a full cart and try to use the self-system, it craps out around 25 lbs. The person has to come over every 25 lbs and authorize the reset while you pack into a second cart.
Of course, you can go through the register line with 27 older people trying to buy four items each.
It’s a shame, the market is huge, great selection, the bakery is great, but everyone in the checkout is mad as hell.
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 will say one time I placed a big box to the right of the scanner then scanned it, but the machine vision system had already decided I was trying to sneak that box past the scanning area and flagged me as a potential shoplifter, despite having scanned the item before the vision based anti-theft flagged things and shut down the isle. So Walmart’s anti-theft still does flip out on occasion.
Certainly better than the days when every other item would do “unexpected item in bagging area”, but still can be obnoxious and the employee acts so suspicious when you trigger it.
Between having about 10x self checkout as manned checkouts, and some bad bagging experiences, I strongly lean toward self checkout, at least if I have a reasonably small amount of stuff. Larger orders I do the “load my car” which is supreme laziness for me and most work from the employees, but don’t trust them with perishables and produce.
This is such a weird mentality to me. You don’t get compensated for waiting in line either. Would you really rather stand in line than do self-checkout? Even if it were faster? Doesn’t everyone always say “time is money?” Then you’d be robbing yourself if you don’t pick the fastest option.
Edit: I always pick the fastest option. The less time spent shopping, the better. But then, I’ve never really had bad experiences with self-checkout, so I’m sure I’m a bit biased.
Walmart usually has enough human cashiers such that you don’t have to use those infernal self-checkout kiosks
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.
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.
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.
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.
ny times links are cancer.
I can’t read what that article says, I don’t pay for news.
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.
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 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?
When I worked at Walmart people were constantly ripping open the underwear packages and throwing them all over the place and we would have to repackage them every day
They did steal them too a lot of the times only one from a pack (if you have to steal underwear please take the whole thing not just one)
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.
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
It’s almost as if we should be providing these for free to less fortunate folks.
I remember one time finding a posting on marketplace looking for a tent as someone ruined theirs the night before. I had extra camp gear so I contacted them and hooked em up with a tent, sleeping bag and an air mattress. They were so sweet, I felt so bad for them and wish I could of helped them more.
Imagine how much it would cost for these companies to import through their supply chains some exceptionally cheap necessary goods to hand out for free to anybody who wants them.
People with any kind of money aren’t going to be using shit quality stuff but people who need it to survive will gladly take something that works well enough. It’s not like they’re stealing rolexes or luxury clothes when they go for that pack of socks.
This is not where I live. I think shaving razors are sometimes locked up, but nothing else.
There’s a cvs near me in a very affluent shopping area that locks up all the bars of chocolate and candy so that kids don’t steal them and take them to the movies.
In Boston a ton of shit is locked up at most convenience stores because the homeless population keeps growing and nobody wants to pay for shelters.
Exactly - you see the little lock thing on the display and you’re like, aww shit I have to go find an employee, nevermind.
edit: Urban Anarchy idea - get some of those locks and randomly stick them on display cases!
“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.
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?
You know how in discussions people mention related things? This is one of those times, Sheldon.
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?
Yeah but “These photos of Walmart customers will make you look twice!”
Every single time I see it, I add it to my Amazon cart. It’s not great.
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.
No shit. There was briefly an electronics store in the 90s where literally everything was priced low, but it was allllll locked up, either behind glass or held to the countertop with a security wire. I can’t even remember the name of it. It was like grand opening, grand closing.
De Kijkshop
The wiz?
Man this might have been it. It fits with the time, and I remember the place having a red trade dress. I looked at some pictures of The Wiz but it didn’t strike me as I remember this place, with like everything being under lock and key. Google searches didn’t help.
Circuit City?
Same thing. Fits with the time and red motif, but I can’t seem to recall them locking everything up.
It’s funny because I know exactly where the place was.
The original building became several other stores when was eventually torn down and became a Best Buy.
Right across the street, there was a Circuit City, which is also no longer there. Once that closed, it became another electronic store, which I’m pretty sure simply bought out the inventory and all the displays and fixtures from Circuit City and just kept it open under an independent name. Before that building was a Circuit City, it was yet another electronics store.
So I’m talking about five total electronic stores, right across the street from one another.
The original one, that later became a Best Buy. And across the street, the original one (which I think maybe was the Wiz), which became a Circuit City, and then became something else.
The original place I was talking about that locked everything up, I seem to recall having a name, something to do with cheap prices or bargains or something, not necessarily the word, cheap or bargain, but something implying as much, kind of like how Best Buy implies low pricing.
If anyone wants to dig in further, this was on the famed Berlin turnpike in Connecticut.
Edit : While writing this, I did another search and came up with it possibly being “Service Merchandise,” which had a catalogue showroom approach to retail, and tons of glass-case counters, and had the red motif in the 1990s. Found a post on a vB forum saying this was in the location of the Best Buy, so I’m thinking this was it. I went there to buy a Nintendo Virtual Boy, which seemed so cool in advertisements, but was a pretty big migraine inducing let down (not unlike today’s stereoscopic gaming systems).
Huh. I guess somebody did beat the wiz.
Oh jeez hahaha
When asked for an inventory of items stolen, the CEO said “it’s still printing.”
I just cut shit off the racks or tear the packaging. If it’s in a cage I’m going somewhere else.
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?
The people who check receipts to make sure you’ve paid for everything you are removing from the store. OP is saying that the Costco people are hard core, but that other stores’ receipt checkers aren’t going to try to stop you, which makes those places much more hassle free to just shop and go after you’ve paid for your purchases.
Costco and Sam’s require a membership and letting them check your receipt and stuff is part of the terms of your membership. They could, in theory, take civil legal action against you, in reality, they’ll review video and cancel your membership and refuse to let you purchase in the future. Walmart, Target, Lowes, etc, don’t require a membership. Worst they can do is trespass you from the property.
I’ve only had Walmart ask. I say, “No, thank you.” and keep walking. No problems so far.
The local Walmart hired off duty cops and the law says you can just walk out but they have cop attitudes and will fuck with you over anything because of their stupid power trip.
Durrrr
How much of this shit is managers embezzling goods from their own stores and labelling it stolen or being barcodejacked at the self checkout? They also didn’t note the cabinets successfully reduced thefts
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.
Its funny because I now recall talking to somebody who worked at an electronics store and they would throw items in the trash, report them as damaged and recover them later when taking out garbage.
Its so funny to think now he’d have the keys to the shelves and the same strategy would probably still work.
