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Comment by SquishyPanda23 | Hacker News Reader

Stores used to make customers feel good about shopping there. Adding elements that make your store feel more like a prison don't help here.

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I guess the management at those corporations is so bad they do not realize they are driving profits away by spending money to make it feel like a prison.

Or management is using tons of experience and data to do what they have to do to stay in business in a 2% profit margin business, inconveniencing customers if they have to in order to prevent losses so they do not have to close the store.

I think it's on a store-by-store basis. My grandfather works at a Wal-Mart in a small town with a large minority population and said they average 10-12K in merchandise stolen each month. The store is open 24 hours, but they still only have 1 security guard working 9-5 because they'd lose more money from lost sales due to minority groups typically having bad experiences with authority figures and avoiding the store.

This is easily noticeable if you have experience visiting stores in poorer parts of a city and the same brand stores in a richer part of the city.

$12,000 a month? That's almost nothing for a store like Walmart.

Nothing only if the other stores subsidize that particular store. In reality they will just close unprofitable stores.

I don't mean it's nothing like they should simply absorb the costs, nothing as in a very low number for a Walmart.

"This decision must be correct because management is making it" is a strange idea. Clearly they make mistakes. And clearly their data may not be sufficiently deep for "the new security measures make people not want to shop here so they stay away"

Of course every decision is not correct, but the previous responses were written as if the purpose of the decisions that management made was to inconvenience or harass people, rather than simply an effort to stay in business.

> the previous responses were written as if the purpose of the decisions that management made was to inconvenience or harass people

I didn't get that at all. A little bit of trying to discourage shoplifters. Maybe you read a different thread.

If they have to harass people to stay in business, perhaps they shouldn't stay in business.

Whether or not they should stay in business will be determined by the success of a competitor offering customers something different.

I would not bet on it though.

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