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.
The wiz?
Now do one about the overworked pharmacists
I wish the pharmacy was still owned by the pharmacist
Durrrr
Especially when you have one employee trying to cover the entire 16,000 square foot store. She isn’t able to stop checking people out to come help me get allergy medicine? It’s pretty bad when Walmart provides a better experience .
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.
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.
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.
Technically it would be trespassing, since your entering an area 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.
Just recently, my wife wanted an eyebrow pencil, so we popped into a drugstore. All the makeup stuff was behind locked cabinets. We just turned around and went to a different store.
It seems like a particularly bad idea for anything that people might want to look at different versions of. If I wanted AA batteries that were locked, I might be okay saying, “Hey, can you grab me the batteries?” But for something that I want to look through the options, I’m not going to do that with the employee standing there tapping their foot.
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
That’s funny, and good on you for not being intimidated into being rushed or leaving. If they want to lock the stuff up, they should deal with the impact.
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
Lol what kind of sucker goes to cvs ;)
Not everyone is rich enough to pay 10x prices on everything
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.
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%.
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, no shit. It’s almost like the entire fucking world was telling you this when you embarked on this ridiculous plan.
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.
article is paywalled. I found a similar article with no paywall: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/walgreens-shoplifting-retailer-james-kehoe/
paywalled
Headline is right.
'When you lock things up…you don’t sell as many of them’The irony…
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I assume their entire business model is “Hope the boomers don’t notice we jacked the price up significantly.”
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.
