'The bane of retail.' Many big chains now lock up all kinds of merchandise
latimes.com
latimes.com
>His company also has developed technology — the Freedom Case, they call it — that allows shoppers to open cases themselves using personal information such as their cellphone number or by scanning their face. More than 40 retailers are testing the Freedom Case in stores, Budano said, including a national chain he declined to name.
Absolutely revolting that any retailer would even consider doing something like this.
Well, they don't have your colonic map on file, do they.
Overall my point is just that the retail theft story is blown way out of proportion, and many media and political outfits benefit from concern around crime.
I think the more interesting questions are if the rates of theft are changing. IF it has gone 10x in 10 years, that might be noteworthy, no? If theft rates are concentrated in 10% of locations, that might be noteworthy too.
My national retail supermarket has profit margin of about 1% of sales (ticker ACI). If mismanagement was always 1%, and now theft goes up to 1%, the company will go bankrupt.
Laundry detergent is actually a really common item for resale, maybe because everyone uses it. You will see people with 40 gallons in their cart and you know they aren't paying.
Its not a fun experience.
Firstly, employee-related shrinkage includes inventory control and accounting errors ("paper shrink") in addition to employee theft. These are often added together to differentiate them from external theft, but they're not the same and the mitigations for each are as different from each other as they are from external theft.
Second, and relevant to the GPs point, there is variation in the amount and proportions of shrink from one site to another across a chain. The stores that get closed are the outliers, not the average stores. e.g. Your chain wide average shrink is 2%, but all of your stores in this one market are 10% for several years running. Realistically, the difference is almost entirely from external theft.
You are suggesting we take the poorest paid retail workers and expect them to hold down criminals! Planet la la. I cannot imagine the employers giving workers training or defensive gear either. And zero backup when workers get taken down as retaliation on the way home...
Following your logic perhaps we just need robots with guns.
> Following your logic perhaps we just need robots with guns.
That doesn’t follow at all.
It really sort of radicalized me against any sort of property-protecting action on the part of an employer.
Two decades later I realize that some balance is probably appropriate, but I don't think that having the law on my employer's side would've improved things. I'd just have had the state on my shitlist also.
... and if they are profiling customers, the settlements are going to make their shrinkage losses look like pocket change
Most people do not get handed the item from the lock case. I believe it's policy at most stores, the item goes to the front where the person requesting the item asks for it at the register.
People like you or I may be handed items from the lock case, but that's because we look trustworthy to the employees. (Wearing nice clothes, hair kept tidy, etc)
I can tell you've never met me.
An argument against incarceration is that it might turn minor criminals into hardened criminals.
Maybe transporting undesirables to a continent inhabited by cockatoos wasn't the full shilling?
An uncomfortable truth about transportation is that while there were hardened criminal types sent over, the great demand was for skills .. the convicts sent were largely desired - stonecutters, wood workers, draftspeople were needed to build a new world and those early Colonial megaliths didn't erect themselves.
The majority of convicts worked without chains or imprisonment, which allowed political prisoners such as the Fennians to make with The Great Escape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalpa_rescue
Abel Magwitch was quite the benefactor after all.
Same for someone who wants to pick up $500 tool, can't produce a wallet, cash, or credit card.
... which is still one step ahead of the battery area. Where there's no button, and when you do flag down an employee, they tell you that you have to go to customer service, because they have a key, wait in line there behind returns, lottery tickets, cigarette sales, to have them walk with you to the battery area, you point out what you want, and then they take it to a register that you then have to go through that register, regardless of the line, if you were still shopping.
It's ... fucking dystopian. And I don't live in an economically challenged area.
Sounds like you do. The stores are losing sales, why else would they do that?
If they do just hand over the merchandise there's a decent chance that loss prevention personnel are watching you all the way to checkout.
I don't know, that doesn't match my experience, unless the store employees are really darn good at being discrete.
In terms of profiling - some folks are sick of theft - so the sentiment change if they start taking a harder line on theft may be smaller than you think. The profiling is easy. Pushing a shopping cart past the registers and out the front door without paying.
A local place cracked down majorly on this - I think it's been good for the business. The locked up merchandise is an absolute mess to deal with though - they don't have enough staff and so much is locked up so you spend a lot of time waiting to get stuff. I've started going to another location of this one store that is in an area much less impacted by retail theft - it is night and day just in atmosphere and accessibility.
A 2024 version would have less paper and more robotics, but the retail concept in the US worked quite successfully for decades. Treated staff decently as well…
Other “poor” problems are having your car broken into, being assaulted on public transit, and sending your kids to subpar public schools.
I’m glad I’m in tech and can pay to be insulated from all of this.
When the system is aligned against you, it's natural to disregard the system's rules.
What an utterly selfish and borderline cruel thing to say. If you're familiar with H.G. Wells The Time Machine, you'd be wise to remember what the "poor" Morlocks used as their food source.
All these wealthionaires buying land in New Zealand so they can theoretically "escape" the global economic and social meltdown -- an expected consequence of their broken policies and practices -- should it ever occur should perhaps be gifted copies of the book.
But are probably too stupid to get it. So: Never mind.
Every single item on every single shelf was behind glass. I had to get help to get myself a pack of cheap non-prescription painkillers.
This article focuses on the phenomenon, but it misses the key point that struck me that day. I could only imagine such precautions were due to endemic theft. And petty theft for essentials such as medicines doesn’t speak to stealing for profit, but to desperation, like stealing food. I was left wondering: what is going on in America?
You’re 100% wrong here. There are a couple ways I’m aware of to go about selling personal care items and medicines for profit.
-Sell them to a broker/fence who sells to ‘bodegas’ and other retail stores who buy discounted stolen merchandise
-Box it up and ship it to Amazon and have Amazon fence it for you (seriously). I’m sure Amazon is aware but doesn’t care.
> I was left wondering: what is going on in America?
Shoplifting under $1000 isn’t prosecuted in a lot of places, which enables the above behavior.
Maybe they’re desperate for money. But they’re certainly not desperate for $20k of baby formula [1].
[1]: https://www.fox8live.com/video/2024/03/24/police-thieves-cau...
However cases like the one in that link--and knowing at least some of the products get fenced and resold rather than consumed by the shoplifter--make it really hard for me to fully buy into that worldview.
But that's just me. I could be wrong.
https://v.redd.it/61j51qvwkgwc1/DASH_720.mp4?source=fallback
I wonder if some of it may be related to the opiate epidemic.
Interesting that CVS and Walgreens are both victims of retail theft and (former?) opioid suppliers:
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/cvs-walgreens-to-p...
The solutions are straightforward, but retail will do everything short of actually employing human beings and treating them well.
If this provides enough opportunity, Amazon will eventually start shifting these goods at enough localized warehouses that they'll be able to deliver in less than a couple hours. When that happens, these retail stores can go bankrupt like they deserve.
Plus, it’s incredibly unfair to the employees to make it their problem. A cashier or stocker or whatever shouldn’t be responsible for doing anything other than calling 911.
However, that would require an increase in the number of employees to ... you know ... check people out.
In addition, "normal" (read: not organized crime of some flavor) shoplifters will do a lot less of it if there are enough employees around that they think they will get observed--especially if you then ban them from even entering the store. If, however, there are two employees for a whole bloody store, people will have zero compunction about trying to pocket something since their chances of being called out are zero.
Again, you fix this by having more employees.
Instead, these retail companies are just whining hoping somebody else will spend the money to fix the problem that their own penny pinching caused.
> A cashier or stocker or whatever shouldn’t be responsible for doing anything other than calling 911.
I agree with this 100%. However, there are a lot of things you can do with psychology that will deter shoplifting behavior far short of accosting people.
Finally, not treating your employees like shit means that your internal theft won't be as high, either.
This isn't all that logically hard to figure out, it's just not profitable.
Big chains, almost by definition as they operate, don't care about their workers.
Alternatively, if your store figures out how to take care and value your workers, your workers will care about your store and the locality in which the store exists, and they will work towards solving this problem.
This is a pretty backwards view of this situation. The workers should not be the one solving this problem, and the store should not be putting them in a position to do so. Locking up goods deters theft at a cost to the store. A worker confronting a thief deters theft but at a potential significant cost of the worker being assaulted (or charged with a crime for assaulting the thief).
The way this should work is that if the workers see the theft and call the police, who intervene appropriately.
But honestly Bay Area shopping is now worse than what you'll see in developing countries. Stores are rundown and dirty, many things are perpetually out of stock, homeless roam the aisles. I'm sure all the profit-related metrics are optimized to death though.
Big chains tell workers never to confront theft, because the insurance risks are not worth it.
Society says that thefts are also not worth dealing with.
What have those employees figured out?