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Crime The Internet

Locking Up Items To Deter Shoplifting Is Pushing Shoppers Online (axios.com) 276

Posted by BeauHD from the broken-shopping dept.
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Axios: Locking up merchandise at drugstores and discount retailers hasn't curbed retail theft but is driving frustrated consumers to shop online more, retail experts tell Axios. Retail crime is eating into retailers' profits and high theft rates are also leading to a rise in store closures. Secured cases can cause sales to drop 15% to 25%, Joe Budano, CEO of anti-theft technology company Indyme, previously told Axios. Barricading everything from razors to laundry detergent has largely backfired and broken shopping in America, Bloomberg reports.

Aisles full of locked plexiglass cases are common at many CVS and Walgreens stores where consumers have to wait for an employee to unlock them. Target, Walmart, Dollar General and other retailers have also pulled back on self-checkout to deter shoplifting. "Locking up products worsens the shopping experience, and it makes things inconvenient and difficult," GlobalData retail analyst Neil Saunders said, adding it pushes shoppers to other retailers or to move purchases online.

Driving the news: Manmohan Mahajan, Walgreens global chief financial officer, said in a June earnings call that the retailer was experiencing "higher levels of shrink." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy spoke of the "speed and ease" of ordering online versus walking into pharmacies on a call with investors last week. "It's a pretty tough experience with how much is locked behind cabinets, where you have to press a button to get somebody to come out and open the cabinets for you," Jassy said. schwit1 adds: "The American-style retail shopping experience was invented in a high-trust environment. As trust erodes, so does the experience."
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Locking Up Items To Deter Shoplifting Is Pushing Shoppers Online More

Locking Up Items To Deter Shoplifting Is Pushing Shoppers Online

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  • not to mention (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ClueHammer ( 6261830 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @08:29PM (#64700804)
    Convenience, not having to deal with other people or to fight with traffic to get there. Basically physical stores are dead, and they has been for a long time.

    • Re:not to mention (Score:5, Insightful)

      by taustin ( 171655 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @10:49PM (#64701082) Homepage Journal

      I'll have to let my employer know. If they have the time to listen, what with counting all the money coming in and all.

      Locking high theft items up is not, in and of itself, a cause of driving customers away. Doing so while having crap customer service is. If you have to wait longer for someone to unlock the display than it takes to look the thing up and order on your phone, yeah, sure, you're going to order online. But if there's an employee nearby who is paying attention, you have what you want now instead of in a couple of days.

      Interestingly, that same good customer service is also the most effective deterrent to shoplifting. The last thing thieves want is for an employee to be nearby paying attention. Not because they look suspicious, but because that's the job - take care of customers. All customers.

      Of course, that requires hiring enough staff, and wages are the second biggest expense in any retail operation after cost of goods sold. Bean counters see that as a cost to be minimized. Competent retail managers see it as an investment that returns more than it costs.

      • I'll have to let my employer know. If they have the time to listen, what with counting all the money coming in and all.

        Locking high theft items up is not, in and of itself, a cause of driving customers away. Doing so while having crap customer service is. If you have to wait longer for someone to unlock the display than it takes to look the thing up and order on your phone, yeah, sure, you're going to order online. But if there's an employee nearby who is paying attention, you have what you want now instead of in a couple of days.

        And even if you’re not getting the best service in the store and have to wait 5 minutes more, you’re still getting your product immediately, as compared to waiting hours or days for ANY online order.

        Perhaps humans complaining about the machines taking their human jobs, shouldn’t be so impatient with demanding machine-like performance and perfection.

        Interestingly, that same good customer service is also the most effective deterrent to shoplifting.

        Being gainfully employed and punishing crime, is what deters shoplifting. Stop deluding yourself. Even the unemployed judge will steal to put

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by e3m4n ( 947977 )

        It depends on the items too. Locking up 1800 tequila is one thing. Locking uo shampoo, even small packs of tide poss, and sticks of deodorant, well to hell with that store.

        • Yeah there's also the cognitive effect similar to when you stop at a gas station on a road trip and everything is behind bullet proof glass.... oh this place isn't safe, I need to get out ASAP

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        I'll have to let my employer know. If they have the time to listen, what with counting all the money coming in and all.

        Locking high theft items up is not, in and of itself, a cause of driving customers away. Doing so while having crap customer service is. If you have to wait longer for someone to unlock the display than it takes to look the thing up and order on your phone, yeah, sure, you're going to order online. But if there's an employee nearby who is paying attention, you have what you want now instead of in a couple of days.

        Interestingly, that same good customer service is also the most effective deterrent to shoplifting. The last thing thieves want is for an employee to be nearby paying attention. Not because they look suspicious, but because that's the job - take care of customers. All customers.

        Of course, that requires hiring enough staff, and wages are the second biggest expense in any retail operation after cost of goods sold. Bean counters see that as a cost to be minimized. Competent retail managers see it as an investment that returns more than it costs.

        Its more of a case of shops not having enough stock for me. Drive all the way to the nearest supermarket (10-15 mins each way assuming there's no traffic stoppages) only to find out 3 out of the 5 items I went for either aren't in stock or aren't even stocked at the shop at all. Especially when it comes to things that are product specific like replacement bags for a vacuum cleaner. Even my shampoo has become easier to order online and cheaper if I buy 3 bottles at a time.

        Food is pretty much the only thin

      • At my grocery store they have 3 isles full of beer, wine, and liquor. Yet they have some high theft liquor locked in a glass case. This means. you don't get to steal padrone you get to steal 1700. In all serious though, if it's in the glass case I don't buy it because of the delay to get service, so instead I go to the liquor store next door and buy it where it's on a shelf.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vilain ( 127070 )
      Most of the time, Target (love to beat up on them) either doesn't have what I went there for (razors, detergent, Hershey's Nuggets, Crystal Light). I gave up getting any underwear or socks. That aisle is always a mess because people pick through it and don't put stuff back. Associates fight an uphill battle keeping stuff sort of in the right section. I don't have that problem with my local CostCo.

    • My local Walmart keeps the men's underwear behind lock and key. I'm not going to ask the clerk to unlock the underwear cabinet and won't you please get me this pair and size. I'm just not.

      • The Target in DT Minneapolis has quite a few items behind lock and key. I used to shop there from time-to-time for convenience over lunch since it is skyway connected. However, I haven't stepped foot in there in a while due to their increasingly hostile stance toward shoppers. With the constant police presence and foot traffic barriers/routing, I feel like they don't really want me, or anyone, to shop there.

  • It Moves The Problem To Your Home (Score:4, Insightful)

    by NoWayNoShapeNoForm ( 7060585 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @08:36PM (#64700820)
    Shoplifters now visit your door step

  • I saw this for the first time a week ago in a CVS near were a relative lives. Am Item I was going to buy was locked. I decided not to buy it and off another store. I have to wonder how much sales are lost due to this.

    And yes, if the item was locked in the other store, I would have used Amazon. I hope CVS sees this post.

    • Some of the biggest draws for traditional stores are location and convenience. They get a decent lock on a certain geographical range of customers. If they do their job well, people will flock to them rather than seeking other outlets. However, it is also very convenient to shop online these days. If I'm at a physical store and find that I need to hunt down as associate to unlock a display for some insignificant product, I won't even bother. Next time I'm at home and think about it, I'll just order one off

    • About 30 years ago I went to an Off License (booze shop) in Liverpool, UK (in a particularly crappy bit of town). It was locally known as the Silence of the Lambs because it had a narrow transparent plastic sided walkway down the middle, with a counter at the end. You'd ask for what you wanted, and the staff would walk up and down the shelves to get it for you. They, and their products were always a sheet of plastic away from you.

      That's a pretty extreme example, but I guess they'd had so much theft and the

  • Lock them up. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @08:39PM (#64700840) Homepage

    If we lock up shoplifters, there will be less shoplifting.

    • I thought "tough on crime" wins votes in America. Would love to know why the politicians won't change the laws and policies to crackdown on shoplifters...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        The laws don't need to change to lock up shoplifters. Just the enforcement policy. But are you really sure it's a good idea? Prison is often a school in advanced criminality.

        That *something* should be done is fairly clear, but just what I find much less certain.

        • Re: Lock them up. (Score:5, Interesting)

          by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @10:11PM (#64701030) Homepage

          In many jurisdictions, "prison" is somewhere people get put for more than a year, with "jail" used for less than that.

          Shoplifting isn't normally a crime that gets prison time. In fact, it rarely gets even jail time nowadays. In many cities, they won't even arrest you; a ticket is the most you get.

          The result? In many of those cities, shoplifting has become a group activity. A group of people will simply walk into a store, load up shopping carts, and push them out to their cars, with little fear of being stopped. Milwaukee news reports on them regularly, sometimes with video.

          So people move to having their stuff shipped from online sellers... and stolen off their porches.

          Unless the thief happens to trip and break a leg while doing it, they won't be there when people get home. If they DO, they'll sue for injury.

      • In certain states, the criminals put in their elected representatives. "tough on crime" doesn't play there.

        How's that working out for you, Cali? How's that working for you, NYC?

        Yeah, that's what I figured.

        See, what happens is this -- when the crime's done removing all the decent people and good businesses, it falls to ruin. Then, when someone else comes in and does get "tough on crime" and clean up the place, new people and new businesses move in. And then, in a rising choir, the locals yell "GENTRIFICA

    • Start shooting the thieves and there will be even fewer left.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Start shooting the thieves and there will be even fewer left.

        Pay no attention to the large uptick in murdered shopkeepers though.

  • They had ONE advantage (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sjames ( 1099 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @08:45PM (#64700854) Homepage Journal

    Brick and mortar had two significant advantages over online. You could easily hold the product in your hands to make your decision, and you could just grab it and head directly to checkout to have it today.

    The same places that lock everything up are the ones that never have adequate staff. You're lucky if you don't find the checkout uninhabited, much less getting someone with the right key to show up any time soon to unlock the case.

    If you're not going to get a good look at it anyway and can't just grab and go, might as well get it cheaper online and you don't have to go beyond your front door. When you shop online, nobody cares if you're in your underwear.

    • The fun part is when you can just pick things up, check yourself out all nice and smooth and legal; then the shopping cart wheel locks up as you cross the threshold. Customers only take so much abuse, then we leave.

      Sears Roebuck was a century before their time. Just deliver everything, that's where we are going because civilized society can't get our criminal punishment in order. Tolerance only works the first time, after that you become a doormat (-- society is here).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sjames ( 1099 )
        In many ways, Sears Roebuck was the Amazon of it's day. They had a real opportunity to do it again, but missed the boat.
        • Sears was taken down internally by it's greedy C-Levels who abused their power to sell off all of the company assets, and make it take on massive debts to pay for their management "fees". Sears' demise was in no way a "missed" opportunity on the part of the company, it was a liquidation to enrich it's owners.

    • Brick and mortar had two significant advantages over online. You could easily hold the product in your hands to make your decision, and you could just grab it and head directly to checkout to have it today.

      The same places that lock everything up are the ones that never have adequate staff. You're lucky if you don't find the checkout uninhabited, much less getting someone with the right key to show up any time soon to unlock the case.

      If you're not going to get a good look at it anyway and can't just grab and go, might as well get it cheaper online and you don't have to go beyond your front door. When you shop online, nobody cares if you're in your underwear.

      Went to Home Depot to buy a power tool. The poser tools were locked up so looked for someone to open the case but there was no one around so went home and bought it at Amazon.

  • Retail crime and high theft rates are not what is eating into their profits. The companies are literally eating too much of its own profits by paying all their useless executives way more money than they have ever deserved, while at the same time offering literally zero upsides to go into their stores. These companies quite literally just keep making the worst possible decisions because none of them know anything about how to actually run a real business.

  • 1) Items locked up will not be purchased unless an employee is within 2 aisles and available. 2) Self-checkouts designed to funnel everyone into one tiny area means they don't trust you; go elsewhere. 3) If the bathroom has a lock, you shouldn't be anywhere in that neighborhood.

  • So they've started locking up the wire at Lowe's (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RightwingNutjob ( 1302813 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @09:18PM (#64700932)

    Not just the 10/3 and up but even the 18/5 thermostat wire that sells for like $20 per spool.

    Now if only the people that run this great and glorious people's republic of Massachusetts were boasting about locking up the crooks and petty thugs instead of preening about lowering the prison population and reimagining criminal justice, all while sinking a billion a year on $200/night hotel rooms for all the illegals just showing up...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Locking stuff up is probably more to do with reducing staff than a rise in theft. Cheaper to install a lock than to employ someone to monitor CCTV.

  • Not Shoplifters, Look what is locked up (Score:3)

    by oumuamua ( 6173784 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @09:19PM (#64700940)
    Socks, underwear, toothpaste, .. ring any bells?
    Right! South Park , the characters on missing underpants discover a society of tiny, magical gnomes who are stealing their undergarments for a supposed profit. When asked about their plan, the gnomes describe their method as,
    Step 1: Collect underpants.
    Step 2.
    Step 3: Profit.
    The gnomes are branching out to other products!
    The store owners are simply not imaginative enough to make their own profit plan.

  • The local Walmarts here have locked up a lot of their items, that requires an employee to open the cases - even things like cheap hand lotion and men's underwear! (not ladies underwear? Huh.) And many more products are behind these flip covers, mainly intended to collect fingerprints, that scream "THANK YOU FOR SHOPPING AT WALMART, BITCHES! BWEEP BWEEP BWEEP" when you lift them.

    The entire thing is really damn insulting. And for some kinds of people that is simply a no go. Personally, I would smash one of th

    • ...anal-probing before you can go in ...

      Have you been shopping? The shops worry about your anus when you leave, not when you enter.

    • I'd rather we nuke the shoplifters. Stop tolerating it. It's no longer an individual that is the problem, it is now an organized crime; we should start treating it as such.

      As for locking everything up, no one wants to visit a prison, why would I shop in one?

      Anyone remember Best or Service Merchandise? They used the catalog display model. The way it works is the public area is just models on display and the rest of the store is a warehouse. You see the product but can't just walk out with anything. You
      • How modern stores work is not traditional.

        In a traditional store you told the shopkeeper what you wanted and he gathered it or you.

        Society being honest enough for the way we now do it is a fairly new thing, and it looks like it wont last.

      • I'd rather we nuke the shoplifters. Stop tolerating it. It's no longer an individual that is the problem, it is now an organized crime; we should start treating it as such.
        As for locking everything up, no one wants to visit a prison, why would I shop in one?

        You want to make the whole world a prison, instead of a school. Why should I buy your ideas?

  • Anyone tried that? Does it solve shoplifting, employee theft, leaving and taking packages at doorsteps? Leaving is as stupid as taking.

    • That's why the whole system is broken, of course. You can't operate education on a capitalist basis. It will never work like x dollars in, y dollars out, and even if it did it's not the same people paying as benefiting.

  • Depends on where the store is (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chuckugly ( 2030942 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @09:56PM (#64701006)

    In my experience whether or not some items are locked down depends a lot on the neighborhood the store is situated within. I generally consider shelves with locked items a strong signal to end my shopping experience and drive away before real trouble starts. That sort of response would certainly reduce sales.

    • This doesnt explain why chains like CVS have been locking up mens products as a standard policy for so many years already.

      While there are bad neighborhoods for sure, I suspect you will find that prior to recently, shoplifters were as much of a problem in lilly-white upper-tier suburbia as anywhere else.

      Things are different today than they were 20 years ago.

      How do you suppose these "flash lootings" are organized? They didnt all meet up in someone's living room and discuss their evil 30 man plot. This i

      • Sure maybe, I've not been in a CVS for a long time but I was in a RiteAid last year as well as a Walgreens, and their stuff wasn't locked up. It was in a small peaceful sleepy town where I own a house. I went to a few of those sorta places in LA a few times, and immediately walked out and got out of the area.

        Some places are still nice. Stay in those places and try to make sure the factors that made LA a cesspool stay in LA.

    • You live in constant fear, don't you?

  • Punching out Pubic Lice (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Monday August 12, 2024 @10:59PM (#64701098)
    So you're trying to tell me that, after about a hundred years of modern retail in America, a bunch of stores fired all their cashiers who were getting paid minimum wage and replaced them with expensive checkout kiosks, half of which were broken at any one time, and thus needed even more expensive repairs, and which do nothing to deter shoplifting, and then there was an uptick in shoplifting, and instead of going back to the system that had been making them rich for a century, they instead bought a bunch of even more expensive merchandise lockers that require the physical presence of a worker who no longer even exists for every single sale, and they actually lost more money? Color me shocked.
    • These organized flash lootings are on the rise.

      The end result may be the end of these chains, large ones especially. Their stores are a more attractive target for organized looting because of how uniform and predictable they are, while their size makes good solutions highly cost-inefficient and as well as a poor experience.
    • A century ago shoplifting was treated as a crime, and prosecuted as such. Heck throughout the 70s and into the 80s I remember signs in most stores saying things like 'Zero tolerance for shoplifting. We prosecute!' and they did. But to prosecute shoplifting you need to have a police report. Apparently policing is racist now, so it isn't done. So no prosecution is possible. Hence the continued rise in shoplifting.

  • Employees cost a lot of money, but now you're forcing customers to bother those very few employees you still have left.

    If you want to post a person there all the time... I'm sure it'll lower shrink too, even without the security cases.

    If you won't... then people won't buy as often from you. Seems you need to provide something to customers... sorry, no more free rides (simply stock a shelf and money rolls in).

    • Imagine going in and needing 7 different items, all 7 of which are under lock and key in different isles...

      This type of defense from shoplifting is best done differently. If an employee needs to fetch most of my items, then thats a service provided by an employee, and they are doing that service very wrong. At the very least its terrible presentation of that service.. where the customer has to both find the item and then find an employee that will provide the necessary service, possibly repeatedly.

      In th
  • If they let me order it online, they gather it all (at no extra charge) then I come pay and pick it up, then lock it up all you want?
  • CVS has had most mens products behind lock and key for as long as I can remember.

    Whats actually new here besides who is affected by these policies? I dont imagine men were stealing razors.

    I think women were stealing those mens razors because the womens selection sucks and soccer moms have a lot of mid-day free time on their hands.

    Meanwhile a man will use a mens 3 blade disposable for 2 months because they are that good.

    I could imagine they were experiencing double digit shrinkage on such products wi

  • "Vending Machine". If you lock it up, fine, but don't make me wait 15 minutes for a human to unlock it, automate fetching and paying.

  • About a week ago I was at the grocery store, but couldn't find any of those small-ish store baskets to carry my purchases to the register. I asked the employee watching the door, she said the store had recently bought a bunch more new baskets, but most of the them had already been ripped off, RFID tags and all.

    We both had to agree that some people are just awful.
  • It seems that most police forces and states in the U.S. have decided it's cheaper to let shoplifters go without any real consequences, given today's costs. But instead of realizing the damage this approach causes, they haven't caught on yet that it's actually encouraging more shoplifting and creating a downward spiral. In contrast, where I’m from, shoplifting is almost non-existent because anyone caught gets dealt with on the spot by the staff before the police are even involved.

  • What, did you think they were joking? They said that they thought shoplifters were justified, oppressed, etc.and they meant it.

    So we let shoplifters run wild, and then stores lock stuff up ... before they simply close. Leaving you with utterly predictable (and predicted) "food deserts", "pharmacy deserts", etc.

    What did you think was going to happen?

  • You know, we could just arrest and punish criminals?

    We used to do that, when we were a high trust society.

  • How we got here (Score:4, Informative)

    by DarkOx ( 621550 ) on Tuesday August 13, 2024 @08:10AM (#64701814) Journal

    Fundamentally retails forgot how we got to where we are and why. They reacted to the problem of increased shoplifting neglecting to consider why they oppertunity exists in the first place.

    In the early 19th century you would have gone into the mercantile. Almost everything would have been behind the counter. You might have even handed a shopping list to the clerk and he would have gone and pulled it all from inventory, rung you up and handed you the goods. In other cases like for hardware you'd have asked, "what have got in the way of door hinges" and he would have flipped his inventory book open to the hardware section, it would have had descriptions and maybe even drawings and he would have spun it around for you to look. Then you'd pick something and he'd either go in the back and find it or, add it to the order list..

    Meanwhile, everyone else was waiting inline to be helped.. Self service retail was invented so you could help yourself, go thru the inventory on your own, compare items physical place the items not selected back on the self etc, all while others did the same thing. It was supposed to be efficent. It was supposed to make it easier for the shopper unsure of exactly what they wanted to see the range of available things in the category, once you move it all behind the glass we back to the catalog but with more walking and pointing...

    The drug store in particular. I don't even know what the hell SuperClearHDX is even supposed to treat! Seeing the front of the box does me no good. I need to be able to turn them over, look at the active ingredient, look that symptoms listed, see things like how often I can reapply in 24 hours. If I can't do that quickly, I might as well scroll thru stuff on web page, or look book at the storefront if its about getting something right now.

    Why on earth would I want to wonder around a 2k sq foot store, wondering if eyecare products or east or west of skincare or north or south of haircare only so I can see only the front of the boxes, have to pull out my phone to look the product details up online, and then search the store for an employee with keys who I must lead back to the item I selected and get them carry it up to the register...

    Its a process that reeks of forgetting the original problem..

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