These days, it feels like many stores are fortresses.
Most of the products on the drug store shelf are behind lock and key, even everyday items such as deodorant, toothpaste, candy, dish detergent, soap and aluminum foil. Manufacturers that supply lock cases and devices to chain stores have seen their businesses boom.
Walgreens and Rite Aid have said that the problem of organized retail crime — rings of criminals that steal products from stores and then often resell them on online marketplaces — is causing them to lock more products up and close some stores.
“It’s extremely discouraging to customers,” said Paco Underhill, the founder and CEO of behavioral research and consulting firm Envirosell. “It is a brutal experience for the merchant, too.”
The reason why stores resort to locking up these products is simple: to prevent shoplifting. But these decisions are far more nuanced and fraught for stores than you may think. Companies must walk a delicate line between protecting their inventory and creating stores that customers don’t dread visiting.
Shoplifting in America
Until the early 20th century, locking up products was the norm. When customers visited a store, clerks would provide them with the items they wanted from behind a counter.
This changed as the first self-service stores like Piggly Wiggly in the early 20th century discovered they could sell more goods and reduce their costs by spreading out merchandise on an open sales floor.
While having fewer workers in the store increased profits for chains in recent decades, it has left stores in some cases without as many visible personnel to deter shoplifting, crime prevention experts say.
Shoplifting has been around for centuries, but it “came of age in America in 1965,” author Rachel Shteir writes in “The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting.” The FBI in 1965 reported that it had jumped 93% in the prior five years and “was the nation’s fastest-growing form of larceny.”
Three years later, officials around the country said there had been an additional surge in young teenagers shoplifting. The trend became part of the counterculture, as exemplified by Abbie Hoffman’s 1971 “Steal This Book.”
In response, an anti-shoplifting industry and corporate “loss prevention” (LP) and “asset protection” (AP) teams sprang up. Technologies also emerged such as closed-circuit TV cameras, electronic article surveillance and anti-theft tags.
‘Hot products’
Stores look to protect “the vital few” products that are most profitable for them to sell, said Adrian Beck, who studies retail losses at the University of Leicester. And they’re willing to accept higher theft on the lower-margin “trivial many,” he added.
Shoplifters target smaller items with higher price tags, often called “hot products,” which typically are what retailers most frequently lock up. One criminologist created an apt acronym, CRAVED, to predict the stuff at highest risk: “concealable, removable, available, valuable, enjoyable, and disposable.”
The rest is here: https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/30/business/drug-stores-locked-products/index.html
One more sign of a society in demise. And one more sign of a people becoming desperate.
Hard days ahead but we gotta do what we gotta do.
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Thieves like name brands, sell it for half price? Food stamps can be a barter, on and on, left on the peoples back. Theft all the way around.
Amazon will benefit
Nail hit squarely on the head Mary!!! 😉
I recently couldn’t obtain some small parts locally that I needed to complete a project. The local stockist always had them & was easily able to get more up until they ran out of stock last year. They blamed a halt to production of new parts & an inability/massive delay to ship anything on “covid”. 6 months after initially ordering they still had nothing. They still haven’t got any parts today or any hope of getting any soon. A friend suggested I look on amazon & as I don’t do online purchases he said he would order for me & pay for them. I found the parts I wanted very quickly, he ordered them, and I received them from overseas in 4 days! I still feel very dirty for having had to resort to doing that but it was literally the ONLY way I could get said parts. Over the months prior to receiving them I exhausted every other possible method bar me flying to another country to buy over the counter! I will never do it again. I f*cking HATE what ours enemies are doing & I f*cking HATE them & everyone who is repeatedly going along with & knowingly supporting this agenda.
The agenda to completely destroy independent businesses as quickly as possible & “force” everyone to use digital money to buy everything online from THE ONE BIG MONOPOLY with all it’s fake front companies is VERY REAL!!! I’ll say it yet again on this comment as I’ve said before – these creatures have to be stopped by any means possible as quickly as possible or the eventual outcome will be absolute slavery/hell on Earth for the vast majority who live/exist here!
Ally, there is no shame in this game. You obtain whatever you need to get through the next few years. Being prepared keeps you independent. I buy local as much as possible. If I have to buy from Wally world I buy USA made if I can. If not I buy from other countries but very last is China (and only then if I absolutely need the item which thankfully hasn’t happened too often)
I also purchase from Amazon, not for convenience.
https://nypost.com/2022/07/30/spam-goes-on-lockdown-due-to-inflation/
I f*cking HATE what ours enemies are doing & I f*cking HATE them & everyone who is repeatedly going along with & knowingly supporting this agenda. THANK YOU!! Also they want us dead! They the vaxxed are spreading sickness and disease and they know nothing apparently!?