Yup. My local Safeway has 2 security guards on duty at all times and one by one the aisles are starting to get locked up.
We started shopping elsewhere.
It’s not just a convenience thing. Although it’s really shitty to wait for a person to unlock it and then feel pressured while they stand there as I’m reading the labels and comparing items. It also just feels icky. Like I’m being punished for something. Probably for not being rich.
What do you suggest the stores do to curb theft? I’m being serious too? Just ignore it?
You’re gonna roll eyes on the answer or already know what needs to be done. We need to change the system so people are less inclined to shoplift.
I have the same reaction whenever i find what i need… Locked away…
I leave
The one employee in the entire store is busy at checkout. I’m just gonna order it on Amazon.
Yeah, “I’ll just Amazon it” is becoming a more common phrase. It’s cheap. The delivery is surprisingly fast.
Downside is you’re making one of our wealthiest oligarchs even more powerful.
And, of course, it could be stolen off your doorstep before you can even get to it.
Don’t forget how it’s becoming more and more likely you’ll just get a counterfeit.
Ehh, I mean if you were gonna buy it from CVS/Walgreen’s, they aren’t exactly an altruistic alternative…
I agree, best to avoid the wealthy oligarchs, but sometimes you need medicated allergy eye drops and Bob’s Corner Store doesn’t have them.
Totally agree. I’m no saint. I’ve purchased from Amazon. But the last election showed us that Bezos is very much not our friend. I’ll be damned if I give that leech another Amazon Prime subscription.
Didn’t we finally realize that the whole “shoplifting epidemic” was all bullshit to cover up inept corprate management?
Yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/29/briefing/shoplifting-data.html
ny times links are cancer.
I can’t read what that article says, I don’t pay for news.
I walked into walmart to buy underwear and socks, they were all in lockup. I opened the amazon app on my phone, matched up the exact thing I wanted that was behind glass and it showed up at my house the next for for approximately the same price.
The fuck? I understand locking up stuff like booze, since that shit do be quite expensive, but fucking underwear?
underwear, deodorant, and toothpaste are commonly locked up where I’m from. it’s the most stolen stuff as it’s a basic need for the homeless
It’s almost as if we should be providing these for free to less fortunate folks.
I remember one time finding a posting on marketplace looking for a tent as someone ruined theirs the night before. I had extra camp gear so I contacted them and hooked em up with a tent, sleeping bag and an air mattress. They were so sweet, I felt so bad for them and wish I could of helped them more.
Imagine how much it would cost for these companies to import through their supply chains some exceptionally cheap necessary goods to hand out for free to anybody who wants them.
People with any kind of money aren’t going to be using shit quality stuff but people who need it to survive will gladly take something that works well enough. It’s not like they’re stealing rolexes or luxury clothes when they go for that pack of socks.
This is not where I live. I think shaving razors are sometimes locked up, but nothing else.
There’s a cvs near me in a very affluent shopping area that locks up all the bars of chocolate and candy so that kids don’t steal them and take them to the movies.
In Boston a ton of shit is locked up at most convenience stores because the homeless population keeps growing and nobody wants to pay for shelters.
I think it’s just the next iteration of the detergent theft crap. Everyone needs socks and underwear; they’re stocked in bulk and are easy to resell.
When I worked at Walmart people were constantly ripping open the underwear packages and throwing them all over the place and we would have to repackage them every day
They did steal them too a lot of the times only one from a pack (if you have to steal underwear please take the whole thing not just one)
How much of this shit is managers embezzling goods from their own stores and labelling it stolen or being barcodejacked at the self checkout? They also didn’t note the cabinets successfully reduced thefts
Not as much as you would guess. Managers are the most likely source of serious theft, but at the same time, they are usually being paid $70k-$100k a year and typically have bonus agreements where if the stores profits go up in a financial quarter they get a payout, and there’s a lot of store managers getting more money from their bonus than their payroll, so to motivate theft you need a VERY greedy manager who is going to get more than 6 figures from the scheme or he’s risking his job for less money than his job pays anyway. The most common method is falsified sales, that’s gonna get him his bonus when he knows he’s not hitting metrics and was really expecting the payout. I’ve seen a few managers get caught on this. Next you have the more complex attempts, like filling in fake data for large ticket item deliveries or printing out delivery sheets with no sale in the system at all, then you have the delivery to a known place and you keep the high ticket items and sell them out otherwise profit off the delivery, this can go on for some time before it becomes evident. Sometimes there’s smaller scams like the Walmart managers that were cashing out giftcards, putting them back on the shelf and 100% getting away with it because Walmarts system was probably out of date with modern standards. Then you have the wild schemes like getting free mech from vendors, returning that mech in the system before inventory and getting yourself fired for petty theft before anyone figures out you have stolen several million dollars in comped merchandise that never existed in the first place so no one’s even looking for it. Being fired for theft is a nice master touch, because it caused a ton of confusion when they bring the charges to police. Who are easily confused. But you know. It’s not ALL management and a lot of high theft items are too cheap to be internal theft, spray paint, exacto knives, cheap earbuds, usually it’s a ‘‘I can’t get past the ID check’’ type of theft.
Its funny because I now recall talking to somebody who worked at an electronics store and they would throw items in the trash, report them as damaged and recover them later when taking out garbage.
Its so funny to think now he’d have the keys to the shelves and the same strategy would probably still work.
Almost like if a middle class existed, many ancillary problems wouldn’t exist.
Hey now. Don’t you dare put our oligarch’s wealth in even the slightest bit of jeopardy.
Shoot, mea culpa, I’ll go back to working off my medical debt like a good peasant.
I’d be okay with them forming this takeaway, but I think there were indications that the thieves were generally pretty well-off; it was often organized groups stealing and selling the goods by value rather than individuals in need of those specific things.
It was never about “theft.” That hyped “theft” up as a cover to hide their own inept management.
Idk, theft was pretty rampant at some of my local stores, not quite as bad lately. I’ve personally witnessed a few people steal from my local grocery store in the last year or two. My local Home Depot was even worse until their security guard shot a guy and they rearranged the checkout lanes. Now in order to go through the exit you have to go through a long corridor of self checkout lanes with several employees. And I’d probably be less likely to rob a place if I’d heard their security guard shot a guy.
Around here that just means they’d shoot the security guy first. That’s why so few banks have visible armed security anymore.
The current SOP is to just let the perps take whatever, don’t offer any resistance, and let the cops track them down, and make an insurance claim. And optionally slip a dye pack in the proverbial money bag. If you’re a bank or a big enough business the cops will be falling all over themselves to chase the robbers on your behalf. If you’re an independent business owner… probably not so much.
Our local Walmart has two (2) in-uniform and on the clock state policemen posted there at all times. On our dime – that is, the taxpayers. Meanwhile in the 'hood you can’t even get the cops to show up for a shooting in less than four hours.
It’s definitely about theft. Hard to manage that away.
Walmarts are doing this with things like cosmetics in some areas too, though at least in the one I frequent they have a checkout counter and clerk in the immediate vicinity. Not sure it won’t still frustrate the honest people who have lots of other options.
Sounds like his job should be converted to an AI bot. This fucker makes how much money, and didn’t identify any of the problems that regular people in this thread easily identified? Turn his role into AI. Save the share holders his salary.
I can make thr same dumbass decisions for half the price.
That’s what happens when you make so much money you no longer remember what it’s like to shop for necessities.
Fun thing is that you could probably make an AI say they need more locking or none at all. There’s coherent words toward either strategy, and LLMs only care about making coherent words. So I guess just like most CEOs…
LLMs are not the only form of AI. They’re just the one that’s most visible to the public right now
But they are the only sort that would be applicable to the suggestion of “replace CEO with AI” today.
They quite literally would not be.
If they had more than 2 people working at a time it wouldn’t be a big deal
If they had more than 2 people working at a time
I don’t live in America but judging from what I heard, what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum? Like, I heard so many complaints of self-service checkouts having no one staff looking after them, which leads to customers going to manned tills instead, because they couldn’t deal with technical issues especially for the seniors. Then when a senior is asked if they want to use automated checkouts instead, they reply with the snarky response “I don’t work here.” You can’t blame people for being reluctant to use the self-service checkouts, if there are no help! Where I live, there is always a staff looking after the self-service checkouts because of the inevitable technical issues or customers not knowing how to use them.
My guess for this poor implementation of technology is because bosses think machines are meant to replace humans as workers, when realistically machines should help people with work. We don’t live in yet in a world where there are robots with the artifical intelligence as good as the human intelligence. And we are still way far from having robots with good dexterity skills as humans to completely replace us.
what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum?
It all comes back to money > humans in this fucked up country.
The business leaders don’t care about their customers. They will sell out the people they depend on if it makes the numbers 1% better. And then COVID taught them how they could make things even worse.
But then the rest of the people don’t have enough respect for the employees, other customers, or themselves to demand better.
what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum
Before covid, they were just starving support staff slowly. A few automated checkouts, less hands on the floor than in the 90’s and the 00’s. You’d often have someone re-folding, re-organizing, and restocking at all times. in the 10’s it became more like staff during busy periods only.
When covid hit, the stores went to absolute operation bare minimum or even less. They figured out that they could literally put no one on the floor, stock and refill at night and profits boom. We’re seeing that across almost all industries. It’s like someone said, hey, have you tried just not providing any service at all AND raising prices. (e.g. health insurance) We should all be in the streets for blood, but we’re not. The idiots are bringing back the right wing, expecting them to care at all about their plight.
We are in a rather self-destructive area of capitalism. The top is expanding as fast and hard as they can. They are bleeding the lower and middle classes harder than they ever have before. I give it a year top before everything crashes and inflation puts us about on par with the lesser economies.
You can’t blame people for being reluctant to use the self-service checkouts, if there are no help!
Much like with the locks on the storefronts, self-checkout is obnoxious in large part because the store owners don’t really trust you to swipe your own merchandise. The machines are constantly yelling at you for putting things on the wrong side of the machine or putting stuff in your basket before you finished checkout. And if you do anything wrong, the machine locks itself down so you can’t finish paying.
Why should you need help at a self-checkout? Its contrary to the very premise of the system.
I don’t typically have this issue at Walmart at least. Their self checkout is smooth and effective these days.
That said I still don’t use it, because it’s still shifting work to me without giving me compensation for it. If I got a discount for using the self checkout, sure, but I don’t. So I’ll keep using manned registers.
Walmart usually has enough human cashiers such that you don’t have to use those infernal self-checkout kiosks
This is such a weird mentality to me. You don’t get compensated for waiting in line either. Would you really rather stand in line than do self-checkout? Even if it were faster? Doesn’t everyone always say “time is money?” Then you’d be robbing yourself if you don’t pick the fastest option.
Edit: I always pick the fastest option. The less time spent shopping, the better. But then, I’ve never really had bad experiences with self-checkout, so I’m sure I’m a bit biased.
I will say one time I placed a big box to the right of the scanner then scanned it, but the machine vision system had already decided I was trying to sneak that box past the scanning area and flagged me as a potential shoplifter, despite having scanned the item before the vision based anti-theft flagged things and shut down the isle. So Walmart’s anti-theft still does flip out on occasion.
Certainly better than the days when every other item would do “unexpected item in bagging area”, but still can be obnoxious and the employee acts so suspicious when you trigger it.
Between having about 10x self checkout as manned checkouts, and some bad bagging experiences, I strongly lean toward self checkout, at least if I have a reasonably small amount of stuff. Larger orders I do the “load my car” which is supreme laziness for me and most work from the employees, but don’t trust them with perishables and produce.
My local market was the WORST. They still use the scale version. They’ve shut down all but one register. So if you get a full cart and try to use the self-system, it craps out around 25 lbs. The person has to come over every 25 lbs and authorize the reset while you pack into a second cart.
Of course, you can go through the register line with 27 older people trying to buy four items each.
It’s a shame, the market is huge, great selection, the bakery is great, but everyone in the checkout is mad as hell.
Self-service stuff is utter crap for any number of reasons. I had to call staff multiple times (thankfully they are staffed where I live) on some trips. It is fucking stupid. They don’t make things faster or easier. They just make them annoying.
Well Kmart when they were still open, was doing this to drive the company into the ground so the CEO, who owned all the debt the company had personally, could sell the company for all the pieces, land ownership, brand ownership, production and shipping elements. Why other companies do it I can’t imagine why. You’d think all of them aren’t trying to do the exact same thing.
I was gonna say, this level of theft is possible because of the number of people in the store that care if that store is stolen from.
At a Mom&Pop shop, there’s only one person behind the counter, but they have free time to ask how someone’s doing when they pick up something they intend to steal. Plus, any other customers in the place are relatively loyal, and not of the “stand around” variety. At a big chain store, there’s two employees doing the job of five that can barely even point someone to an aisle, and not a single customer cares if the CEO bleeds out in an alleyway.
Exactly - you see the little lock thing on the display and you’re like, aww shit I have to go find an employee, nevermind.
edit: Urban Anarchy idea - get some of those locks and randomly stick them on display cases!
My Walmart has a little button to summon an employee. The last time (as in, both the most recent time and the final time) I went there at night to try getting diaper rash cream for my baby I pressed the button, and waited.
And waited.
Pressed the button again.
And waited.
Sunk cost fallacy. I’ve already waited so long, what if as soon as I walk away to find an employee somebody shows up?
After 10 minutes I went to find an employee stocking the shelves and told them what I needed. Their answer was “yeah, we saw you buzzed but we don’t know who has the key. If we find out we’ll have them open it for you.”
So I left .
I hate Walmart so much.
Yeah but “These photos of Walmart customers will make you look twice!”
You guys know this article is about Walgreens, right?
It’s about sales losses due to keeping items behind locks at Walgreens. The person you replied to gave an anecdote of the identical problem at another retailer, in order to emphasize that this is a clear problem for both retailers and customers. It hardly seems irrelevant to the conversation?
You know how in discussions people mention related things? This is one of those times, Sheldon.
“I don’t want to bother them, they’re busy”
And underpaid
And understaffed
And they’re people. Ever since automatic checkout, I can get out there without talking to a single soul.
Every single time I see it, I add it to my Amazon cart. It’s not great.
Stopped at my local Best Buy the other day. Needed an SSD that was locked behind glass. After attempting to get help for a half hour I ordered one on eBay from the parking lot and drove home. I’ve honestly tried to support brick and mortar where I can but I give up.
I ran out to Walmart to grab my kid some cough medicine. It was locked behind the cabinet and since it was later than 6pm they couldn’t unlock it and told me to come back tomorrow.
I will never go back to Walmart for medicine…
I’ve tried asking for help, but the person I find doesn’t work in that department and the assigned person doesn’t show up for like 30 minutes. It’s faster to drive across town to the store that doesn’t have my item behind glass.
Has absolutely nothing to do with prices being too high
There’s a retail strategy of putting products at your fingertips in the checkout aisle in order to entice you to buy it. Candy right next to you, so you’re munching on it when you leave the store. You feel good, they get money, no additional load on the staff.
This is, effectively, the opposite strategy. Make getting your hands on anything annoying and difficult, increase the number of floor clerks you need to constantly unlock the shelf, and generally make the retail experience slower and more unpleasant.
Both are correct. It’s too expensive AND it doesn’t help sales. There are no reps around to unlock the doors, why would you wait to buy?
Target near me has all the booze locked up. They have a button you can press to get an employee to open the cases for you to buy something. I waited 10 minutes for someone to come and open up the case to buy a bottle of Campari. Nobody ever showed up. I wrote Target to tell them I’ll be looking elsewhere from now on for any item they keep in a case.
10 minutes for a bottle of alcohol? That’s bullshit. I’ve never seen a place where the liquor is locked up near me.
Yup. It’s TOTAL bullshit. I felt like I was in some place like Pakistan where they keep the booze locked up and you have to tell them how many Units you require and then they go and get it for you. But worse, because they never fucking get it for you at lockup Target.
I wonder if anyone considered installing a camera and a remote-triggered lock so a cashier, manager, or security person could just buzz someone in. All that crap is SUPER cheap now.
Or machine vision to track item pickups and follow the person around the store and out. You may need a cover over the items to have them pause to lift a plastic cover to give the system enough to confidently note that person X has collected item Y and placed it in cart/pocket/prison pocket.
Nearfield (NFC) was supposed to do this. I was supposed to be able to fill a cart and just push it out the store and be charged.
Yeah I remember an at in the 90s of rolling a shopping cart without scanning and here we are 30 years on… Still scanning…
Well, it’s not NFC but Amazon has some convenience stores that can do it, I think there’s a limit on the number of items though.
I can just imagine a shopping cart full of NFC transceivers screaming out there serial numbers simultaneously.
I’ve seen convenience stores that have a buzzer that turns on (very, VERY annoying buzzer) whenever someone opens up the liquor fridge in their store. This signals that someone is picking up some beer. It cannot be avoided. You want to be quick to get what you want and not have your ears buzzed off, but shoplifting alcohol is really hard that way. You can get it quick anyway.
e a buzzer that turns on
I’ve seen that before, but it was a LONG time ago. Very effective for small stores.
I have gone to a local electronics store, Best Buy, several times in the last few years because I wanted something immediately only to be stopped at the last moment by a locked shelf and no one around to unlock it. What the fuck are you even supposed to do there? Scream and shout until someone arrives? Quietly stalk an employee until you find your moment to strike? I just fucking leave, I’ll wait for shipping.
Took me 25 minutes to buy a $4 brake light bulb at wal mart one night. After tracking down an employee to track down another employee to meet me by the glass door. I’ll never buy car bulbs there again. That portion of store is dead to me.
I went looking for a new cabin air filter since I had a gift card. The auto employee had literally no clue what I was talking about and just pointed at the wall of air filters with a shrug. Five seconds in an O’Reilly and I was on the way home
Same thing for me with a $10 headlight. Last time I needed one they weren’t locked up, so that was an unpleasant discovery. The employee was super busy with other customers, so I don’t blame him one bit.
I honestly wonder, is it illegal to simply unlock those things, if you have no intention of actually stealing from them? It’s not like they use particularly high security locks. You can probably buy some simple lock raking or cylinder lock tools.
Is it actually violating a law to unlock one of those cases if you don’t have any intention of actually stealing something?
lol that’s way too much effort to give your hard earned money to a shitty company
I avoid Best Buy like the plague, I can’t even remember the last time I went there, maybe 5 years ago? I went to buy a monitor and had to pass like 3 fucking security checks and a receipt checker.
The whole experience was so off putting, I just never went back.
The last thing I tried to buy at Best Buy they simply didn’t have in stock, despite their in store computer system and their web site insisting they had dozens of the damn things. Never mind getting someone to unlock the case; I couldn’t have bought it for any price no matter how badly I wanted it. I gave up. I haven’t been back since.
Microcenter is pretty much the only brick-and-mortar electronics/computers store left that’s worth a damn, which is convenient because they’re also pretty much the only one left, period. Too bad they have barely any locations compared to Best Buy.
I bought some Beats Solo Buds right after Christmas. I had a trip upcoming and couldn’t wait for shipping so I looked at Best Buy and they said my local store had them. After waiting 20min for them to not find the right model or colour I went across the street to Target and bought them there, which still took at too long.
I order everything usually and my trial back in brick and mortar revealed it’s only gotten worse now.
A few years back bought something at Best buy and they asked if I needed a receipt or was I ok with just getting it emailed. I said I didn’t need a receipt. Then I was stopped at the door because I didn’t have a receipt, and they had to get the cash register person to vouch for me.
To their credit, for a gift card so I bought something there this past weekend and it was pretty much frictionless. Walked by the guy at the door with the product and no receipt or anything and didn’t signal at me.
Walmart near me on the other hand has an interesting strategy. If I am carrying stuff in a bag, no problem. But if I skipped the bag, they ask to see my receipt. So guess you just need a plastic Walmart bag to shoplift…
You actually don’t need to show them the receipt if you’ve already purchased the goods. It’s your property now and they can get fucked. I do it all the time.
Technically it would be trespassing, since you’re entering an area you’re not authorized to enter, but no damages, assuming you don’t like break the lock or something.
You’re not likely to get sued for nominal damages (one dollar) for a technical trespass. They might ask you to leave. If you have a key and nobody is around, go for it. The keys are generic.
You can actually just buy whatever keys you need online. When I worked in retail it was a major issue. Groups of thieves would come in and hand off the key to multiple people so each could go grab stuff from different areas.
Is it actually violating a law to unlock one of those cases if you don’t have any intention of actually stealing something?
It probably is.
My state has a definition in its shoplifting statute that includes tampering with packaging, removing tags, or defeating security devices even if the product does not leave the store. I’m sure others do as well. Technically they could probably bust you even if the very next thing you did was take the thing to the checkout and pay for it. Not worth it, in my opinion. Just buy from someone who doesn’t pull that shit and let that good old fashioned Free Market Economy these chucklefucks love so much take care of it.
A simple solution would be a buzzer system that calls an employee to your aisle. But if an employee has the option of meeting shelf stocking or some other target, or spending time helping a customer, which isn’t as easily tracked and doesn’t look as good on a chart when bosses look at it, which do you think that they’ll choose?
My local petrol station has the same person stocking shelves as serving customers a lot of the time, it creates a right nightmare situation.
My walmart has buzzers but they ignore them.
