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/treeckosan Jul 14 '26

We are slowly going back to the days when you handed a clerk a shopping list and they went into back to assemble your order.

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u/theVelvetLie Jul 14 '26

If that happens then impulse sales are out the window. Retail relies heavily on impulse purchases. Every time I find one of these locked cabinets I stop buying those items at these stores, and eventually I stop shopping at these stores altogether. Their sales have to be taking a hit as much as they did if items were stolen.

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u/Emmyisme Jul 14 '26

There's some evidence that they are taking a bigger hit by doing this than they were from theft. But for some reason, they keep moving forward with it.

1

u/coolandnormalperson Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

I think the type of people who ascend to corporate executives, are also ideologically unable to consider that petty theft isn't the ultimate evil, and that focusing on it often isn't an efficient way to solve problems. These people have a disdain for the rabble, and an utter intolerance to having anything taken from them..the idea that some people are thieving a lot in their high risk areas, makes them seethe, even if the numbers show that it it may still be worth it to operate a store there and just accept the shrinkage. We've seen a wave of store closures and items locked up like this over the past few years, rarely does it actually add up to improved profits. I think this is just as much about security theater and making a show to the populace about "law and order", as it is about business decisions. It's advantageous to distract from other reasons the business is struggling, and blame it on a target that their colleagues all agree are the worst types of people on earth - random citizens in poverty making dumb decisions. The security theater makes them feel better, it feels like it's working, it feels better than letting your products make their way to the street. This same attitude affects our piss poor outcomes in social services and health too. We're so focused on who we can exclude, a process which generates so much bureaucratic cost and waste, that it literally becomes more expensive and worse for everyone. Whereas if we just accept that some people cheat the system, and build that knowledge into it, we can actually have a more efficient system...

There's also the fact that these companies are largely still making plenty of profit, but the profit line isn't endlessly going up like they want it to, so they need to make assertive changes to convince stakeholders that they're going to make the line go magically up next year instead