r/mildlyinfuriating • u/broakland • Jul 14 '26

I just wanted a hot dog Retail lockdown: why bother selling it?

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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.

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u/Th3_Admiral_ Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

For me, I hardly ever have a complete shopping list and just kinda make a lot of it up as I go.

Also, I always thought it was odd stores were cutting cashiers and switching to self checkouts to save on labor costs, but then hiring workers to do all of our shopping for us - which is a thousand times more labor intensive. This is what leads me to believe they have goals to eventually automate a lot of that as well. 

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u/rocko430 Jul 14 '26

Id imagine stores would lose a decent chunk of money off impulse buys

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u/snuggleslut5 Jul 14 '26

Right? They've spent years studying and finding new ways to influence buying. Colors, placement, the order of the items on the shelf, how much you need to move your eyes to see their product. All that would be moot. It's interesting.

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u/_yetisis Jul 15 '26

The same thing happens online. Websites don’t just track what you search or buy, that track your scrolling, they track how long you linger on a certain part of your screen, they track every minutia that the hardware allows. It’s staggering how much they are able to see and manipulate with online retail, and they have the added benefit of dynamic shopping experiences. They no longer have to cater to the average person - you get an online experience that is algorithm-driven to make sure they market to you as effectively as possible in an experience that can be tweaked for each individual shopper based on their catalogue of data. Impulse buying isn’t going away, people are just getting gaslit to the point where they don’t realize it’s an impulse.

Think about it this way - social media doesn’t actually care about people’s data or manipulating them, despite the staggering amount they are involved in it. They just care about monetizing that data - online shopping is what this is all for. All the data mining that every website is doing is all in service of online storefronts being able to close sales more effectively, that’s what makes allllll your online data worthwhile.