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