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”.
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.
I went to a Walgreens to buy nail clippers since I was nearby and had a bad hangnail.
Had to push a red button to wait for an employee to unlock the cabinet. After 10 minutes, I ran to find a random employee who was stocking and they got me what I needed.
That was the first and last time I ever went to Walgreens.
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.
In the Soviet Union, the shopper experience wasn’t vastly different. You would stand in different lines to select, pay and collect items, so it was a good idea to bring a chair and a book with you.
Wal Marts in Denver have been doing this a lot lately.
And nearly all of the stores and restaurants that I visited while in Denver locked their restrooms and you had to either get a key or a code to enter them. I’m guessing it is related to so called anti theft measures.
I had a similar story. 2019 I went to the Walmart closest to where I live now and they had closed all the registers, and most of the self checks. I waited so long. I have a ton of stores close to me now so I was only going there on recommendation of a friend. “But they’re so cheap!”
Not if your time has value.
Aldi’s. No bullshit, good prices
Yeah most of them are like this. That’s why it’s the one place where self checkout was actually an improvement. Because they never had anyone at the fucking registers before that anyway. I try to never go there but at least now I don’t have to wait an eternity if I have to go there.
I haven’t set foot in a Walmart since Dec 2014 and I don’t miss it at all. My ex used to order groceries from there but now I get Kroger delivery. Weirdly, we don’t even have a Kroger within 150miles but they’re cheaper and faster.
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.
If you have good insurance you might not notice this, but drug prices at Walgreens and CVS are significantly more expensive than many other pharmacies, like Walmart, Costco, or HEB. Compare prices on Goodrx.com and see
Truth.
More and more supermarkets are opening up pharmacies to compete. And in my town, private practices are now starting to also have a pharmacy.
I’m not supporting Walmart though.
I assume their entire business model is “Hope the boomers don’t notice we jacked the price up significantly.”
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.
Dollar stores are randomly over priced and they manage to treat their employees worse than Walmart.
However, Walmart does treat their customers worse than any retail I can think of which is really weird.
While that is generally true, I will point out that nobody marks shit up to quite the insane degree as the chain drug stores like Walgreens and CVS. If the choice is between a Walgreens and a Dollar General, DG will be cheaper by a country (possibly literal) mile because their markup is is only 500% and not 1000%.
I dunno, let’s pick a random “need it now” commodity item out of a hat. This 4 pack box of light bulbs, $15 at Walgreens and $6.75 at DG despite being in the wrong aspect ratio. A house brand nail clipper to use OP’s example, $2.49 at Walgreens and locked in a case, $1 and just hanging on a peg at DG. Etc., etc.
DG’s main problem is that they chronically and deliberately understaff their stores. It’s literally part of their official management strategy. It also is one of the factors that makes them, perhaps surprisingly, one of the most robbed retail locations in the country.
Oh, most definitely.
I don’t know why anyone would use Walgreens/CVS as their go to for any of the overpriced items in their store. The are both to medication as gas is to the convience stores.
Everything is overpriced but they makes sales because of the convience of picking things up with a prescription.
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.
Now do one about the overworked pharmacists
I wish the pharmacy was still owned by the pharmacist
I wish doctors’ practices were still owned by doctors.
Can you imagine? That would be awesome. I could pay directly to the person providing me a service instead of dealing with all the middle men
My mom owned her own practice, you still have to deal with insurance. Unless you’re so wealthy you can pay cash, you have deal with insurance. Even if they pay her less then the cost of the procedure.
They have played us all for absolute fools
I just cut shit off the racks or tear the packaging. If it’s in a cage I’m going somewhere else.
…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.
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.
When asked for an inventory of items stolen, the CEO said “it’s still printing.”
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.
deleted by creator
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.
In Germany, pharmacies look like that today.
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.
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.
Ah I hadn’t thought about that but that’s a good point
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.
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
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.
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.
This is more urban legend that fun fact.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Walmart usually has enough human cashiers such that you don’t have to use those infernal self-checkout kiosks
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
It may be all sorts, but I suspect the biggest “shrinkage” cost is due to more organized crime. E.g. covers over the detergent, it’s not because of people sneaking it for themselves, it’s because some folks did a black market of stolen detergent.
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
article is paywalled. I found a similar article with no paywall: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/walgreens-shoplifting-retailer-james-kehoe/
Archive copy of the Fortune article: https://archive.is/PoraP
Reminder, using the reader function in Firefox skips almost all pay walls.
More and more sites are only partially loading the reader function info so that it cuts out at the same place as the preview part.
Used to be very helpful though!
I’ve noticed some will truncate if you scroll before entering reader mode, can you provide an example that didn’t work?
paywalled
Headline is right.
'When you lock things up…you don’t sell as many of them’I mean when you give things away you don’t sell as many of them either.
Selling stuff works best in an environment where the goods aren’t free but the people are.
People make money at roadside food stands based on the honor system. Anyone who just thinks “that’s naive” doesn’t know what they’re missing. A trust-based society that keeps accounts is the best society.
The irony…
Thank you! It wasn’t paywalled on my end and I wonder if it activates on traffic.
How interesting, and annoying. Thank you for the post regardless.
