The last few weeks have been very hectic, so I missed this (boldface mine):
Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case, according to a reader survey from Consumer World, a consumer advocacy website. For 55% of respondents, it’s a lost sale, because when a product is locked up, they try to buy it elsewhere. The remaining 13% try to find an alternative product in the same store that is not locked up…
Dworsky acknowledged that the results might be skewing high because it was an opt-in survey that readers took rather than a random one, and said his audience tends to be “interested in consumer matters,” which may mean they have a lower threshold for consumer inconvenience….
“It’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable product galleries armored in plexiglass,” Amanda Mull wrote about locked cases in Bloomberg in August. “The whole thing has a whiff of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops.”
…“If stores lock up too much stuff, they cease to be stores—they become giant vending machines with no place to insert your money,” Mull wrote. “For a lot of shoppers, those locked shelves become another reason to avoid in-person shopping and hand their business over to Amazon.”
I avoid stores, whenever I can, that lock up things I want*, and I know I’m not alone. It’s especially annoying when you have to get multiple items in different parts of the store: either you have to summon people multiple times or drag the poor worker around the store. And there’s no reason to think things are any different from pre-pandemic times in terms of theft.
What convinced me of the uselessness of locking things up is there are three CVS stores near me, each about six minutes apart on foot, and they all lock up different things. My hunch is upper management wanted to limit ‘shrinkage’ so they could wring out every last cent, and thought they could get away with this. I’m sure they’re all still getting good paychecks though.
mikethemadbiologist
Recent research shows that “inventory shrinkage” is overwhelmingly not caused by theft by customers. The vast majority is bad bookkeeping by stores, failure of products to be shipped to stores, products being abandoned in storage rooms, and the like. A small percentage is employee theft. But customer theft is by far the least common reason for “shrinkage”, despite the propaganda we all have seen lots of times. Which is why customers are treated like thieves–and don’t like that treatment and go elsewhere.
Dianne is right on the money about causes of shrink. And for the part that is customer related: customer theft is most problematic at stores & hours which are chronically understaffed.
I don’t buy mundane items from locked displays unless there is no other option. The nearest Target recently got locks for the laundry detergent aisle. It was silly and the employees knew it: after a week or two, they started just leaving the plexiglass doors open so everyone could help themselves. But this generated a new problem: to navigate down the aisle one has to move through a cascade of doors. The doors all open different directions and their isn’t enough room to squeeze through the center without shutting everything on one side. This made that aisle impossible for physically challenged individuals and a rat maze for everyone else. There are 3 different stores within an 1/8 mile that sell identical laundry detergent in readily accessible aisles. I figure those stores are making off like bandits because I’ve never seen anyone in the laundry detergent aisle at Target since they made this change.
The other thing that happens is that store employees are suffering abuse due to the store locking products up. A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak briefly with an employee at the local grocery store, when I pushed that button to summon him to open a locked door. He came running and told me that he had to wear a device that sounded a loud alarm in his ear until he pushed a button. He said that if he had not pushed the turn off button in 30 seconds after his alarm first sounded, it got louder, then louder again–no matter where in the large store he was when he first heard it. That forced him to run from place to place in the store, just to prevent the loud alarm from blasting in his ear. He said he was the only employee on that shift who was doing the unlocking job, for the entire grocery store.Those particular store employees are unionized, so they have some protections on their jobs, so I can only imagine the horrific conditions non-unionized employees must suffer!
I use the pharmacy; occasionally something pharmacy related. I kinda’ new at this city-living, maybe my Montana perspective is moot, but otherwise I’ve yet to see anything at CVS I can’t get down the street at Stop $ Shop, or do without …