Walgreens says locking up products to prevent shoplifting hurts sales
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
Everything is locked up, even items below $5 and you need to find an employee to get a key.
There is only 1 employee in the store, when I was there she was also elderly and obese. She has to run around to every isle to unlock items for anyone to buy anything. She also has to run the register, leading to a huge line. This store has 30+ isles and is quite large.
All the lights are off with a sign saying this is for energy savings. This plus the store not being renovated for seemingly decades makes it feel unpleasant and sketchy.
They have a robot voice announcing periodically something along the lines of “the AI theft prevention system knows you are standing in the soap isle right now”.
Overall unpleasant to shop there and I stopped going even though it’s the only convience store in walking distance.
They trimmed the stores to the bone and now nobody wants to go to the store - it is just too much effort to go to the store to buy anything when there is no staff.
MBA brain, margin management, shareholder return over customers and employees is truly the root cause of why America feels less abundant than a third world country these days.
It's like if you sold cheeseburgers and thought "what if we charged the same price, and didn't include cheese?" and then when that worked because some people don't eat cheese, went "what if we charged the same price, and didn't include bread?" and that worked because some people don't eat bread. Eventually there is no lettuce, onion, or tomato and you're serving plain patties in a paper tray, condiments extra. Customers have dwindled, and the idiots left in charge have never made or sold a cheeseburger or did anything other than move numbers around in an already successful business can't think of a better idea than look at COGs on ground beef and suggest they try selling ketchup on a napkin.
Had that happen last week to me at Kroger and it was really unpleasant.
I've been thinking this must be affecting their business begatively, I wouldn't buy their stock.
I have thankfully never run into locked up things like toothpaste in my life. That seems oddly oddly weird to me.
Why even have a shop if a $5 item cannot be bought easily? What do you guys do if you need to buy 3-4 different items in different aisles? Wait 40 minutes? Or do you drag a store associate around with you until you found and picked them all?
In Germany we have self checkout lanes, they're closed 90% of the time even when the queue is 50m long, and when they're open you have 1 employee for every 3 stations + one employee at the gate. Once you're done paying you have to carry your receipt to the gate and scan it otherwise it doesn't open
Every time I go through that I wonder what the fuck went wrong in this world, this is something you have to go through every day in the so called #1 economy of europe... none of it makes sense, you're a thief by default, you pay the same price even though you do the job.
And it's at least 2x slower because there is always a problem (alcohol/cigarettes needs a manual approval of an employee, if the weight doesn't match the machine locks up and need the approval of an employee, if the scanner is fucked you have to enter the 200 characters bar code manually in the machine, &c.)
America is also diverse. My New York CVS locks up toothpaste while the Duane Reade up the street leaves almost everything in the open. Meanwhile, my small-town Wyoming target leaves expensive electronics in the open because it’s a town where folks feel comfortable leaving their keys in their car (and rarely lock their doors).
It's nothing like that in even smaller cities, let alone the majority of the country being towns and what not
As well as the organized crime, I think there is a culture problem in some areas where it is "OK to steal from the man", well it is until the store in your area closes and now you live in a food/retail desert and have to take a bus to buy anything.
No excuses, but this a macro phenomenon that will always require nuance to understand.
Many poor people probably look at another poor person pocketing $100 here and $100 there on stolen items and realize there’s no point in being a good person. Life is hard, who is going to hand you anything. And so it follows, all of our souls now rot together.
Being poor has that effect on you.
I left and went to Target where I was able to grab all the camping supplies I wanted from the shelves and checkout. I avoid Walmart since that day, as almost everything is locked up.
This is necessary because there are large, open air fencing operations in the San Francisco area that the feds allow to operate with impunity. [1]
Any time you have to do this, just remember: the feds are knowingly and willfully allowing the criminals that make locks necessary to operate.
Money laundering, receipt of stolen property, conspiracy, RICO, theft, burglary? The FBI San Francisco office doesn't give a damn.
Follow the money: without fences, there are no theft rings. The criminals stealing 50 bottles of shampoo aren't about to sell them themselves, they hand them into fences for 20 cents on the dollar.
[1] https://sfist.com/2023/09/23/a-known-fencing-operation-for-s...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/walgreens-tests-digital-cooler-...
My county used to have ~8-10 Walgreens. Now we only have one, and it’s a fifty mile drive. We lost all our Rite Aids too, lost to the weird sale/merger/whatever bizarre shit they pulled off.