When you run bare minimum staffing so there’s nobody on the floor to help a customer and the customer has to hunt around for and wait for an employee to unlock something, yeah. Many are just going to pass on the item.
It’s not a shoplifting problem. It’s a nobody to help the customer problem.
Something as simple as nailclippers stunned me. $3 item, locked behind glass.
“Welp, they don’t want my money I guess…” moving on.
Should ban you from the store for having an anti owner opinion.
It’s not even that, it’s their ultra short staffing that drives people away. I’m not going to go hunt for an employee and wait another twn minutes for someone with a key to open it up.
Home Depot does that and I get tired of waiting and order it from somewhere else.
Exactly! I’ve zero issues with this type of loss prevention. I have 10,000 issues having to find the call button, pressing it and then waiting upwards of TWENTY MINUTES for the Key Master to show up.
Vinz Clortho?
I once did that at Meijer for a switch pro controller, waited 30 minutes only for the person, who was supposed to have the key, just come over and rip the cardboard to get it off the locked hook. We only stayed because we had a Meijer gift card. Insane how long this kind of thing takes.
I don’t understand why they don’t just use a pickup ticket system. Costco does it for some smaller high end electronic products now. Hell, Toys R US did it decades ago with all of their video games and consoles. You just take the paper ticket to the cashier to pay and then the receipt to a pickup window where ALL of those products are kept.
Instead they choose the objectively worst option, extra hardware spread randomly around the store for each product, and spreading already shaky customer service even more thin with large waiting times for a manager with the keys to arrive.
Anyone else remember Service Merchandise? The whole store was just one display model of each thing. You got a ticket and waited for the item to come up a conveyor. I thought it was a great approach
I’ve had this problem at Microcenter and Best Buy too. All the salespeople have a key but there are only two and they’re both tied up helping some grandma who doesn’t know what she wants. After waiting over 20 minutes, I’m like I just need to get this one thing out of the cabinet.
I know you can order ahead and pick up but I like to sometimes pay fully or partially in cash so I get less grief about expensive purchases from my spouse. According to my credit card charge, when I bought my 4070ti the day they came out, it was only $380.
You are using Best Buy to facilitate spousal fraud for gaming purposes!
I like the cut of your jib.
The extra cash was from side hustle money and she never cares where I spend that anyway. But yeah. I never said that it only cost $380, and I never said that it didn’t.
The difference between Home Depot and Menard’s in terms of finding an employee is amazing. I can find an employee in Menard’s within a couple of minutes wherever I am in the store. Good luck ever finding a Home Depot employee, and if you do, good luck getting anything useful from them.
I worked at a store similar to Home Depot in college and let me tell you, they don’t prepare you at all for the kind of questions people have. If they cared at all about investing in the customer experience (which they don’t) they’d hire some retired handymen or something. I seriously did everything I could to limit my voyages from the checkout counter to the employee area because there was a 90% chance I’d disappoint someone on the way.
They can’t hire old handymen when they pay just a few cents over minimum wage.
There’s a bit in Neal Stephenson’s early novel, Zodiac, that has always stuck with me. At a hardware store, everything has a specific purpose. The young guys working at the store can point you to that purpose. What you want is to find the old guy, who knows that everything there has a million alternative purposes.
What, giving you a pamphlet and showing you a video wasn’t enough to make you a hardware expert? (Menial jobs for massive corporations suck so much.)
Yeah it’s awful. I feel bad for those people when I go in there now. Sure they could take it upon themselves to learn everything but let’s be honest, for the amount they get paid it’s only worth doing the bare minimum to not get fired.
Went to Walmart on a whim and saw everything locked up in pharmacy aisles (even deodorant) and I decided to pass. I hate shopping there.
This astounding revelation brought to you by the guy that got paid $13,282,800.00 in 2024.
All brought to by corporate wage theftᵀᴹ!
You’d think a guy like that would understand how theives work more. Perhaps the disconnect comes from him not thinking he is one.
When you’re paid that much, you can outsource the thinking.
You’re correct. His crime is purely white-collar, done with a stroke of a pen, no dirtying of hands at all.
Funny how when you rob or even kill people with a spreadsheet, it just doesn’t count.
This is what happens when 100% of shoppers are treated like the 1-4% who steal.
In general, society spends an awful lot of extra effort just because a few percent might abuse it. Sometimes, it’s completely hypothetical abuse.
Healthcare? Someone might overuse it, and therefore everyone has to pay out the nose.
Unions? They let some people slack off at work.
Child tax credits? Some parents might use it to buy drugs (this was an actual argument from Joe Manchin, and it’s completely made up).
Reduce the military? What if China invades the US?
Not to mention that employees are responsible for some of the theft too
Theft is a huge problem in some locations. Some people have no problem filling up a cart with whatever they need and walking out the door. Employees don’t get paid enough to get involved. Cops only show up afterwards. Even if they catch the culprit, there arent any repercussions.
- They are most likely insured for that.
- Police are ineffective at anything else than filling up prisons with minorities? Say it ain’t so!
- People are desperate, and corps have knocked the social contract over. This is how that looks like, at the mildest.
They are insured. It’s often the insurance company who is insisting on these measures. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter if they are effective or not; the insurance company simply demands that you have them.
Sucks for Walgreens then.
And yet theft rates are the same as they have pretty much always been.
They’ve gone up. And it’s easy to see why. We have a minimum wage that hasn’t been increased in decades and the current model of corporate efficiency is understaffing and union busting.
A huge portion of the population is cash strapped with the only job opportunities being poverty wages.
Desperate people commit crimes.
They have not actually. They have gone up in a few places but are roughly the same overall.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth-vs-reality-trends-retail-theft
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-shrink-walgreens/index.html
With the increase in prices for everything from food to housing, and the greed of large corps being completely ignored by governments, I honestly don’t gaf about shoplifting food or clothing. If I see it happening I walk away.
Are you sure you saw anything? I certainly didn’t. Especially at large corporate retail stores.
True. I may have just been remembering back to when I was a kid living on the streets and stealing food to survive.
Whenever a store locks up something I need that I could buy in 2023 off the shelf, I pull out my phone and order it from another store.
Order it from another store with curbside pickup, don’t have to even get out of the car on the way back home.
I miss the covid version of this where it didn’t cost extra. Some places still don’t charge for it but they are immensely inconvenient for me to get to
I don’t blame companies for closing stores in communities where theft is rampant. If your neighborhood harbors thieves and the police won’t do anything about it, you don’t deserve to have nice things. Live there and are pissed about the situation? Move. Deny said community your upstanding citizenship and let it devolve into a shithole. Leave these poor thieves to themselves and move to a neighborhood that won’t tolerate them.
If you don’t pay your employees enough to care about your business then people are going to take advantage every time. These are all big chain stores that have had a race to the bottom for wages. They replaced many of the workers with self checkouts. Last time I was in a chain pharmacy there were only 1 or 2 employees max and they were all busy doing stuff. Even if they did notice someone stealing, is making minimum wage enough for you to risk a fight with someone?
Instead they have invested in locks for the shelves because it’s way cheaper than hiring people to run your business for you.
Hey look everyone, a really callous and uninformed opinion! Why don’t we all just move somewhere better!
Yep, I bought some caged jeans a couple years ago and was not digging the hassle of finding somebody with a key. Basically doubled the try on time.
Sweatpants forever!
Sweatpants forever, indeed!
At this point I just use pickup and delivery for almost everything. I have no patience for wandering stores anyway.
