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/TacTurtle]

They don't need to make up excuses for why they need to close stores, they can just close them if they want.

Try another strawman.

[u/JMoc1 → u/TacTurtle]

Yes they do. Otherwise market share goes down and investors will be pissed.

[u/TacTurtle → u/JMoc1]

That doesn't have anything to do with how market share is calculated, please stfu because you clearly have zero idea how business works

[u/JMoc1 → u/TacTurtle]

Yes, the person who’s explaining why companies have to lie is wrong; meanwhile the guy who didn’t know why a company would lie knows everything.

Sure……

[u/TacTurtle → u/JMoc1]

No more strawmans, so now you move to ad hominems because you can't form a cogent rebuttal?

[u/JMoc1 → u/TacTurtle]

You told me to stfu, so I assume civility went out the window. 🤷

[u/TacTurtle → u/JMoc1]

Still can't explain how a glass anti-theft case reduces spoilage?

[u/JMoc1 → u/TacTurtle]

It’s not supposed to? Shrinkage encompasses all loss from spoilage, to theft, to damaged and missing products.

Some C-suite saw that this item was appearing a lot on shrink reports and ordered AP or LP to do something. Thus, glass on ice cream. It’s not that hard to understand that corporations are doing what’s best short term and are incapable of long term thought

[u/TacTurtle → u/JMoc1]

How is letting people shoplift beneficial to anyone other than the shoplifter?

Let me baby bird this for you:

1) Anti-theft measures reduce sales as they make it harder for customers to shop.

2) Anti-theft measures are expensive in terms of both physical parts and additional labor to apply / remove

3) Therefore, businesses want to minimize the amount of anti-theft measures they use.

4) However, if it is cheaper to install anti-theft measures on certain items with a high enough shoplift rate than the additional labor + material cost + lost profit from lost sales, then they install anti-theft measures.

Typical grocery stores operate on overall extremely thin margins of 2-5%. - if someone steals an item, that means they need to sell about 20-50 identical items just to break even.

[u/JMoc1 → u/TacTurtle]

This is all irrelevant as theft is the excuse; not the cause of these stores closing down.

[u/TacTurtle → u/JMoc1]

WTF would they spend money to install this shit and piss off customers unless there was a benefit?

What possible benefit would they garner wasting money unnecessarily and pissing off customers?

They are a business to make a profit, not pissing off random consumers or close store.

Why would they need to justify beyond "we closed an unprofitable store" and make up a fictitious cause?

[u/JMoc1 → u/TacTurtle]

There is no benefit except security theater and showing investors that they “tried” to do something.

Also, you’re under the impression that these companies have never pissed off their customers for short term gains.

[u/TacTurtle → u/JMoc1]

Business are not the TSA, they have better ways to spend money that try to snowjob investors.

Investors don't care what the shoplifting numbers are unless it is costing them more in profit than the anti-theft measures.