You can get practically everything by mail now. On Amazon you can "subscribe" to your regular consumables, so they send you some regularly and you don't have to go to Rite-Aid for it.
I will never trust Amazon with food or medicine.
What about shopping physically in WholeFoods?
FWIW, I also don’t trust the standard Amazon store with many things, but I still do use Amazon Fresh and find it fine.
Furthermore, when I ordered sliced cheese in an AF order, it arrived completely moldy... like olive drab colored completely. Amazon Fresh clearly doesn't respect cold chain or consumer safety at all.
It used to be nice to go down to your local Duane Reade 24 hours a day and get anything you needed, often for only a small premium on the Amazon price. It's a different story now.
Amazon loses you availability of access, and while it's nice to get stuff by mail, you can't get stuff by mail right now. That availability is going away.
Lack of availability isn't even my main concern though. In this environment, everyone needs to order everything online. So instead of one truck making a shipment to CVS (I'm oversimplifying), now you have additional delivery vans and ebikes making door to door shipments, each with extra packaging.
edit to clarify my stance in the context of the GP: I strongly dislike ordering things online when there is (or should be) a local alternative, and only use delivery services as a last resort
Just a single anecdote. In SF shoplifting police reports tripled one month because a single target location tested a new system where internal shoplifting incidents were also sent to the police.
It's surprising to me that employee shrink is never looked at as an issue. I personally think that is much more of an issue.
Do you really believe you can conclude this from your personal observations?
The company has all the data on theft. At the end of the day, they are motivated by profit. Don’t you think they ran the numbers and found that locking items to prevent crime, even if it’s an additional barrier to paying customers, was better for business?
edit: fixed a typo
My experience is admittedly anecdata.
> The company has all the data on theft. At the end of the day, they are motivated by profit.
One of the modern fallacies that we've all fallen victim to at one point or another is that "more data" == "logical action".
> Don’t you think they ran the numbers and found that locking items to prevent crime, even if it’s an additional barrier to paying customers, was better for business?
It prevents an aspect of shrink that they can control through an affordable means, that does not mean that it is the vast majority of shrink.
Companies are short term irrational thinkers. Thank the market for that. If they can lock everything up and say "You can expect a reduction in shrink, please pay me and my shareholders", they will. That's easier than locking up employee thieves, which is even easier than actually trying to fight Amazon (who is eating their revenue/lunch).
Yes, because none of the retailers have been willing to cough up data.
If the data supported that shoplifting is a problem and that locking things up helped, the companies would be trumpeting the data. There was a very recent article that nobody, not even the main retailers trade association, seems to know if locking things up is actually improving the situation or not.
The primary hypothesis seems to be that employee theft is the real issue and no retailer wants to admit it because it opens up a whole host of issues that are all solved with "pay money". (ie. Why aren't they paying their employees more? Why aren't they prosecuting these thefts? etc.)
It's on their financial statements and it has been discussed in their earnings calls. The euphemism for theft is "slippage."
As to whether locking things up helps, most of the thefts I have seen recently involve someone politely asking for a good to be unlocked, then walking out the door with it in hand. The lock only stops one person from taking all of it at once.
"Sales lost to locking up" is a lot harder to track, and nobody has been willing to be forthright about it.
Mostly, this is sleight of hand. None of these companies want to admit that online (even their own!) is eating their lunch.
For example: A local target here in Seattle was closed, citing retail theft. I stopped by there before closure; they had everything locked up and most of the shelves were empty. A grim sight, but the key point of the story was that said Target was also surrounded by other grocery store alternatives which did not lock items up and whose shelves were not empty. All within roughly a block or a block and a half of distance.
The empirical observation is that they closed the stores with less retail theft than the ones they kept open.
The recent double stabbing near 14th & 1st was a mentally ill guy in a drug deal dispute in which he was paying via stolen merchandise. People interviewed described him as a regular who would barter his stolen goods for whatever he needed (in the NYT before someone accuses me of reading the wrong sources).
Who said that there wasn't? Prior to current history, people sold boosted goods out of the back of cars or in the back of the same bodegas.
> The recent double stabbing near 14th & 1st was a mentally ill guy in a drug deal dispute in which he was paying via stolen merchandise. People interviewed described him as a regular who would barter his stolen goods for whatever he needed (in the NYT before someone accuses me of reading the wrong sources).
This still is not a brazen robbery, so it doesn't address what I said at all. Addicts have been fighting and killing each other in this city for literally decades.
thank god that facts don't care about your personal opinions on the matter[1]
https://www.newsnationnow.com/crime/criminals-pharmacies-bur...
The article you shared highlights smash and grabs of controlled pharmaceuticals from small mom and pop pharmacies. That's not the type of theft I have any experience with. You're also the only person who invoked drugs.
The article only references one pix11 article, which itself only references a single bust... in Texas... of a ring operating in Arkansas... outside of New York.
> What am I misunderstanding from your posts?
The entire context of the thread above you.
The state being, in the article, NY. They just happen to mention Arkansas in a related fashion.
As for pharmacies locking up small items as well, it's very obvious why it happens, it's becauase of a high occurence of theft. Is this rocket science? Do you think they do it because they can't get enough of the operational overhead of dealing with customers every time they need an item? I bring drugs into the mix because this is all interrelated. Robberries love pharmacies, or at least historically have until they started locking everything up. Drugs are a big factor, and by extension the small stuff gets taken too.
What's the idea there? I hear that those stores overexaggerate the risk. Ok, but why spend the time, effort and money actually locking things down and making it hard for their paying customers to shop.
I can imagine if the threat is not real, they'll just issue press releases, write public letters to the governor, buy ads somewhere, etc, but not actually put plexiglass and locks everywhere, which makes it harder for them to do business in the end.
EDIT: also, cheers to the fellow assembly language HN user name holder :-)
It’s basically now ok to walk into any store in nyc, and just take stuff worth less than $1k, and walk out. Nothing will happen, and police can’t do much since it’s been decided stealing is not a crime here. The people doing this then will sell that same stolen stuff on a street corner a block away for half price.
1) Pharmacies don't want workers going after shoplifters. It's a liability if the worker gets hurt, and even if the shoplifter gets "caught", now the witness needs to show up at the trial for it to mean anything criminally. In other words, the company has to pay the worker NOT to be in the store. The LEA has to pay the cop that responds to be in court. They don't want this. The company's goal is to get the police involved only insofar as is necessary to get an insurance payout.
2) No one wants to go to jail for stealing shampoo. They're doing it because the options for decent work are limited. A shoplifter grabbing $200 of merchandise and selling it for $100 is making 3/4 a day's worth of the cashier's pay in like an hour (partly because corporate workers for that company are overpaid and making that in 1-20 minutes).
The solution has always been and remains to stop f*cking around with income inequality and opportunity hoarding, as a society.
In my case, I used to go to a Rite-Aid for my meds, even though it was less convenient, because (1) they recognized me when I walked up, (2) if there was a problem, a human would take care of it, and (3) there was never much of a wait.
The store was always near empty, which was the mark of doom. They closed it and sent me over to a Walgreen's, which sucked big time. So now I get stuff by mail. The customer service is not any worse, really.
If we had a culture that scandalized theft, and a justice system that penalized such behavior with real teeth, then goods wouldn't have to be locked up and "customers" treated with suspicion.
I will never stop being amazed by the ability of "smart" people to be so illogical
Personally, I agree with you that this is a response to theft and the brazen disregard of law enforcement. I now live in a smaller city that takes theft very seriously and almost nothing is locked up.
I care if my local, family-run pharmacy gets robbed. If someone steals from some corporate behemoth, one that treats me like a criminal regardless of whether I steal from them or not, well, what do I care?
What if its a local owner but you met the guy and think he is a jerk?
What if he votes differently than you like?
Do you think the various groups committing robbery care who owns the store, and if so, care in the same way as you? Would they stop if the pharmacy became locally owned? Would they give up shoplifting if there were no big box stores nearby?
> Do you think the various groups committing robbery care who owns the store, and if so, care in the same way as you?
In the same way as me -- no, probably not. But does the owner of the store matter to groups committing robbery? I wouldn't be so confident that it does not. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'd guess that loss to robbery among chain stores is higher than among mom-and-pop businesses.
Nationally, clearance rates are abysmally low. Everyone knows calling the cops for personal theft is useless. Why aren't they doing their job?
And don't point to those cops in California claiming that it was a lax DA, as that doesn't explain the abysmal clearance rates in the rest of the nation, including in states with DAs who enthusiastically do their job, to a fault. The DA in California does not explain why the cops in my state are utterly incompetent.
Cops don't want to do their jobs
Looked at the guy's profile (and I had his name and address, as he'd sold my phone to someone who was annoyed that it was locked) and it was blindingly obvious that it was all stolen goods:
50+ cell phones, "no charger", "no accessories", some even flagged as locked.
Another 50+ Macbooks - also "no chargers", "no accessories".
Called my local PD (non-emergency) as I'd filed a police report. Told them what I'd found.
PD: Well, he probably didn't steal them himself...
Me: I'm fairly sure that selling stolen goods is still a crime?
PD: ...
Me: ...
My tax dollars, hard at work.
Maybe go after wage theft and employment discrimination?
It's strange to me that people think that the source of "low trust" is the people with rather less power in society, versus the people with more. Most people begin life more than willing to trust. It's when someone who is supposed to be looking out for them betrays that trust that they become embittered.
I do buy more and more shelf-stable “grocery” type items off Amazon every year.
Tell me you don't shop at Whole Foods without telling me you don't shop at Whole Foods.
Whole Foods is actually cheaper than many (most?) grocery stores for staple items. Sure, the grass fed organic beef is expensive, but stuff like rice, pasta, ketchup, snacks, hell even a lot of produce, is way cheaper than other grocery stores. At least in an urban environment like NYC.
Trader Joes is cheaper.
Trader Joes and Whole Foods are comparable on price for staples, at least the last I checked, which is admittedly a few years ago. Things like store brands of olive oil, canned beans, frozen foods are cheaper at TJs, yes, but usually by less than a dollar.
Trader Joes will always be cheaper given how they work.
One of the few categories of store I still visit in person. Often it's stuff I want immediately, sometimes I wanna hold and look at packages, sometimes it's prescriptions and it's easier to just pick those up.
I used to live in Dubai, which is the "instant app delivery" capital of the universe, in my experience -- nowhere else I've been comes close, including SE Asian capitals -- I even got my annual flu jab from a nurse I ordered online from an Everything App and had it during a Zoom call. Anyway, the one type of retail that remains absolutely ubiquitous there? Drug stores, admittedly ones that you can also just WhatsApp and will deliver to you.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3745069/
https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/health/survey-finds-abu-...
https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/retail-pharmacy-practice-...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305425201_Antibioti...
> Self- medicated ABs [antibiotics] is an issue in many countries especially among middle income people regardless of the variation of regulation, guidelines, culture or region. 60% of children patients in Yemen received ABs without prescription12 and 56% of population in Abu Dhabi, UAE according to Abasaeed et. al.7.
> In Jordan two studies showed a close estimation for dispensing ABs without prescription among the Jordanian population. Here, Yousef and co-workers estimated the percentage to be around 42.5% of the population10 while Bakri and co-workers estimated the percentage around 46%
I will never get medication or food from Amazon. I don't even trust them to not sell dangerous counterfeit electronics.
So you insist that "it's just me" be added to every declaration of preference? I would have thought that was understood.
It does indeed seem America has been overrun by narssasisits.
The OP was not about you.
and people who can't spell "narcissist"