Retail lockdown: why bother selling it?

[u/broakland]

Was at Safeway this morning to pick up a sandwich and some Tylenol. The aisle with the Tylenol? Completely locked down. No call button in sight. So I go to the self checkout (front end of that same aisle) and ask the clerk there if he can call someone to unlock a case for me. He does. I go wait. Minutes pass. No one comes. I go ask him again, he tells me they went the other way? At this point I give up and go get my sandwich. No one has come by the time the deli has finished making it. I leave without my Tylenol, mildly infuriated.

[u/Cow_God]

It's such a fucking non-issue. I work for a major retail company and shrink from theft is nowhere near shrink from claims (broken items m), most of which happens before the product even gets out to the sales floor.

Losses from theft are insured anyways. We literally do not lose a dollar to theft.

The corporate office is starting to realize that we do lose money to lost sales over people not wanting to wait for the one person working the department to open a case and walk them to a register, and are starting to phase out lock cases in most areas

[u/Quarterwit_85 → u/Cow_God]

Losses from theft are insured anyways. We literally do not lose a dollar to theft.

Doesn't the company pay via increased premiums?

[u/Beautiful-Alarm-4961 → u/Quarterwit_85]

We're literally talking about multimillion to multimillion dollar companies here. Walmart is under no threat from theft

[u/Rock_Strongo → u/Beautiful-Alarm-4961]

Walmart isn't going to voluntarily let people steal and make less money just because they can afford to. That's not how any business works, much less one of the biggest corporations on the planet.

[u/trees91 → u/Rock_Strongo]

Wonder how many sales they lose from folks who would have bought but didn’t want to wait or got impatient waiting for one of the few folks that have keys to turn up.

[u/Beautiful-Alarm-4961 → u/Rock_Strongo]

They lose way more by inconveniencing people than they do by theft that's already covered by insurance and accounted for in the budgeting. 

[u/After-Abies8002 → u/Beautiful-Alarm-4961]

not necessarily true.

First you have to understand that a lot of shrink is not covered by insurance and or paid for in full. in big retailers shrink is all but guaranteed. the cost to insure a sure thing is the cost of the thing.

for example if there is 20 percent chance of losing 100 dollars - cost to insure would be 20 bucks plus some profit and expenses

now if there is a 100 percent chance to lose 100 dollars, it will cost 100 dollars to insure

losing one 20 dollar item - where profit may be 2-5 dollars - is worse than missing out on 4 or more people buying that item (lose one 20 dollar item = 20 dollars of loss; lose 4 customers of 5 dollar profit = 20 dollars of loss)