I was in a large CVS in South LA the other day and asked the cashier if there was a problem with theft and that's why stuff was locked up. "That's what they say, but they don't schedule enough workers. Only two of us are on shift here all day. One person in the back and one on register"
Anti-theft deterrent also means anti-sales. Nice job, eggheads. "Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case." www.retailbrew.com/stories/2024...
Most end up trying to find the product in another store, according to a Consumer World survey.
TIL that CVS has adopted the Dollar General staffing model.
And of course this compounds the problem since that one employee is now running around opening shelves on top of everything else they have to do.
This is exactly why I turned around and walked out the last time I was in CVS. There's nobody on the floor who isn't working a register, so, basically, I can't buy anything that's locked up, including basic crap like toothpaste. I assume CVS just doesn't want to sell me anything, so I leave.
If everything is locked up, I should be assigned a personal shopper to follow me around to unlock the cases and wait as I peer at the packaging.
The answer to almost every question is "to cut labor costs."
This is definitely true in my local CVS. Very under-staffed. And yet, the other day, I chose to make a separate stop at that store after shopping at a Target with an in-store CVS, bc at Target *all* the drugstore merch is locked up, and I like to examine products before I decide to buy them.
Is the staff shorting also related to how empty the shelves are in general?
How long until they try to revive Amazon's invisible checkout stores? Finally they'll have a way to offshore retail workers.
This really is MBA galaxy brain shit.
We all knew how 'shrink' worked in 2017. Thanks to everyone playing dumb and putting convenient stores in the culture war crossfire, everyone must suffer