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Cake day: January 12th, 2025
  • WoodScientist@sh.itjust.workstoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Walgreens CEO says anti-shoplifting strategy backfired: 'When you lock things up…you don't sell as many of them’English
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    3 hours ago

    If theft is this bad, these stores should just switch back to the traditional model used by pharmacies and general stores. Consider this photo of a traditional pharmacy:

    Or this old general store:

    This is what these businesses used to look like. In traditional pharmacies and general stores, most goods were kept behind counters or at the very least within direct view of those behind counters. A traditional dry good store might literally just be a big counter in the front with a huge warehouse in the back. You show up with a list of goods you want, and the clerk would run into the back and grab everything you wanted.

    The model of a store with aisles that customers wander through is not the historical norm. As industrialization improved, the relative costs of goods lowered, while the relative cost of labor increased. So it made sense for stores to accept a higher level of theft and shopliting by offloading the item-picking process to their customers. They got the customers to do a lot of the work for them, but in exchange they accepted a higher level of theft.

    Now they’re trying to have things both ways. They still want customers to do all the work of picking out their purchases from the shelves, but they’ve decided they don’t like the level of shoplifting that level of low labor cost business inevitably produces. They want the customers to do most of the labor of clerks, but they don’t want to accept the level of theft that inevitably produces.