In the last year or so, if you live in a city–the actual city, not the metro area–there’s a very good chance you’ve had to deal with your chain drugstore locking various items away behind plexiglass, supposedly to protect the goods from a shoplifting outbreak. It’s not a popular policy to say the least. Walgreens might be rethinking this approach (boldface mine):

So we’ve got a lot of things underway inside of our front-of-store envelope of initiatives, beyond getting to the right number of stores so that we can invest in them properly for the customer experience that needs to be, frankly, for — too many of our stores improved.

And so there are shrink elements, for example. And continuing to be — I just met with our Head of Asset Protection to look at some of the creative things that we are looking at, both as a company and as an industry, as it relates to the customer experience on shrink.

I don’t have anything magnificent to share with you today. It is a hand-to-hand combat battle still, unfortunately. But it does impact how sales work through the store because when you lock things up, for example, you don’t sell as many of them. We’ve kind of proven that pretty conclusively.

While there are some things I buy at drug stores because I need them and I don’t have any, in the pre-plexiglass era, much of what would buy was stuff I would eventually need (more of). I might pick up a tube of toothpaste because it’s getting a little low. These aren’t exactly impulse purchases, but they’re not “I desperately need this right now” purchases either. And those will definitely drop if I have to call someone over (especially if I already had to do so). It’s like these CEOs don’t actually use their own stores.

Also, oddly enough, people don’t like being treated like criminals.

I am willing to offer stunning insights like that for half of the Walgreens CEO’s salary.