5 ms·

'Maybe we cried too much' over shoplifting, Walgreens executive says

16 points by DocFeind 4y ago

prottog 4y ago
Funny. They closed stores and put in annoying security measures in high-theft locations and shrinkage dropped, and now they're walking it back a little bit because the additional security measures are costing them money in expenses and lost sales.
- j0hnyl 4y ago
  My local rite aid keeps the ice cream fridge and soaps (among other things) locked. There's no way this actually helps them. It might make more sense to just not carry these products if they're being stolen so much.
  - sobkas 4y ago
    > My local rite aid keeps the ice cream fridge and soaps (among other things) locked. There's no way this actually helps them. It might make more sense to just not carry these products if they're being stolen so much. An you have invented a dollar store, welcome to food desert without nutritional food and most necessary items.
    - j0hnyl 4y ago
      Is ice cream nutritional food? I live in a big city and my point is that no is waiting around to chase down the one person working so that they can unlock the cabinet/fridge for them. Often there's not even anyone to be found to do so. I can get soap across the street at the corner store in two seconds. I can get ice cream at the grocery store where it's not locked up.
wiseleo 4y ago
With sufficient staffing and instant mobile checkout, stores can implement a fully secure experience. The caveat here is "sufficient staffing" of people who can use a mobile checkout solution.
- subharmonicon 4y ago
  What kind of staffing are you referring to, and how does mobile checkout help this situation? At the Walgreens near where I live they sometimes have a security guard at the door, sometimes not. They only allow one of the two doors to open. If the guard isn’t there you’ll see teenagers walk in, dump a bunch of their stuff in a backpack, grab as much as they can carry, and walk out. They come back five minutes later and do it again. This is with a lot of staff on the floor, who recognize them when they come back in. The staff have likely been told not to try to stop them, because it’s a liability for Walgreens. The security does seem to help but even that doesn’t completely stop people from trying. I have seen the security follow people they recognize into the store and then end up chasing them out but the perpetrators still get away. Even more security might help to block the door in that case, but that’s the only useful mitigation I’ve seen in these cases.
- phil21 4y ago
  How do you imagine this working? I live a few blocks away from a Walgreens that is now closing at the end of the month. I've personally witnessed a shoplifter actively shoplifting nearly every time I was in the store over the past year to year and a half. This was a half dozen encounters at least, of varying degrees of audacity from teenagers stealing some makeup to outright crews doing a mini flash mob style raid. In every case staff (and security) were tailing them, and in one instance outright confronting them nearly to the point of physically blocking them. The shoplifters do not care - they know they cannot be touched by store employees, and they also know the police literally will not show up to the call. These are folks filling up entire baskets full of high value items for obvious resale while everyone simply lets them do it. Perhaps this is an outlier, but based on talking to employees, seeing it with my own two eyes, it's fairly clear to me Walgreens Corporate is simply walking it back and taking an L in these locations vs. bothering to step into a hyper-partisan political topic. This is a wild shift in societal norms and values from when I was working retail jobs in the mid to late 90's. We were enabled (and willing) to outright physically detain shoplifters to the point of physical restraint if they fought back. Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly. This rapidly changed towards the end of the 90's into the early 00's. Society starts failing when the answer to every problem is call mommy and daddy (the police) and stops enforcing basic societal norms by itself. We are witnessing the transition from a high trust society to a low trust society in many areas of this country.
_fat_santa 4y ago
Wallgreens is a national retailer, so excess shrinkage at one or a series of locations is offset by below average shrinkage in other locations. Just because a national retailer can absorb something like this does not mean a local retailer with many fewer locations can. It's still a massive problem, just not for national retailers.
- mansion7 4y ago
  Even though Walgreens is a national retailer, non-thieving locations should not be made to subsidize the thieving locations. A Walgreens in small town Illinois with extremely low shrinkage ought not see any negative effects such as price increases because other, more lax on crime cities, perpetuate an atmosphere of lawlessness and tolerance of same.
  - monkeydreams 4y ago
    > Even though Walgreens is a national retailer, non-thieving locations should not be made to subsidize the thieving locations. This is all part and parcel of society, of corporations, of any multi-site organisation. Each node has its own advantages and disadvantages. High "shrinkage" sites often have high sales and a corporation that sticks to "small town Illinois" is never going to be able to offer the economies of scale of Walgreens.
    - mansion7 4y ago
      No. I can get better loan rates due to my great credit, while others who have squandered their credit do not. Similarly, criminal-coddling cities should be burdened with the higher prices that the outcomes of their voting and governance are known to deliver to them. Not unlike how SF voters continually elect politicians who tolerate human feces and needles in their streets and get just that. It would not be fair for healthy communities to have human feces and needles spread on their cities out of some misguided sense of fairness or social justice.
joemazerino 4y ago
Read the article fully. The reason for crying was the over expense on private security while the security being handicapped to actually protect property. This isn't some rebuke about crying over stolen goods.
- bdcravens 4y ago
  The context of where I assume you are making that conclusion from reads differently to me: they are saying they believe their security posture is excessive. > But a year later, Kehoe said Thursday that the company added too much extra security in stores. > “Probably we put in too much, and we might step back a little bit from that,” he said of security staffing. The company has found private security guards to be “largely ineffective” in deterring theft, so instead it’s putting in more police and law enforcement officers.
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    Yes, though that's an interesting phrase - how can the company "put in" more police / LE officers? Aren't they assigned patrols or dispatched for specific incidents?
    - bdcravens 4y ago
      Most municipalities allow companies to hire police for overtime hours in addition to their assigned duties.
      - travisjungroth 4y ago
        Which is just crazy to me. You can pay for police! In uniform! I’m in Peru at the moment and for how much more corrupt people in the US act like LATAM is, I’ve never seen a company here pay police to stand somewhere. But every Apple Store in SF I’ve been to has an officer or two in front when they’re open.
        offlinenative 4y ago
Flatcircle 4y ago
Classic example of an article with a clickbait headline.
pvaldes 4y ago
In resume, somebody was teached again the hard lesson that people dislike buying with security breathing on their napes. Is a spiral of death. Being watched destroys the pleasant experience of browsing things. People buy just what they had in mind and exit, spending much less time in the shop looking for things that they could want to buy. Big red flag. Soon, the big store is half-empty most of the time and being the only customer in a place full of vendors is psychologically disturbing for many people. Less objects are stolen but you sell less, and soon realize that are paying more to security than the loses by shoplifting. I had seen this before when, lets call it "Computer World", decided to increase their results fighting against shoplifting. Warnings in the walls, everything in plastic cases, cameras and security sucking all the fun. They closed in three months.
Andaith 4y ago
Kinda related, but in Sydney, our grocery store "Woolworths" has been tightening the screws on the self-checkout. It started without even a weight scale. Which was really convenient to use: Take everything out of trolley -> scan -> put back in trolley -> pay & go. Then the weight scale had to be used. Then it got more strict, and you had to tell it when using your own bags. Then they had cameras near the barcode reader so you had to show the "item" when you scan the barcode otherwise it'd be like "I don't think that's a shampoo bottle, lets get a human to check". which was frustrating. Now it's even worse, they have overhead cameras analyzing you, and if you click "finished" but leave a bag in your trolley(say, just a crazy thought, from one of the 200 other shops in the shopping centre), then they say "maybe you forgot something" and a human has to come check up on you. Also if you have bags in your hands, or on the floor. I feel like they've been slowly training people... but also, it's now too cumbersome to use so I go to a person(and then complain when there's not enough people sitting at registers).
eyelidlessness 4y ago
Both of the local Walgreens I frequented previously, have just stopped… stocking stuff seemingly arbitrarily? Like lots of it. If you want milk, you’ll get whatever they have in stock or nothing at all. I don’t think they were being robbed of milk. But a broken window and you’re lucky if you can find milk is what they’ve decided to do. Same goes for a bunch of other products not being stolen en masse in any timeframe.

16 points by DocFeind 4y ago

Funny. They closed stores and put in annoying security measures in high-theft locations and shrinkage dropped, and now they're walking it back a little bit because the additional security measures are costing them money in expenses and lost sales.

j0hnyl 4y ago
My local rite aid keeps the ice cream fridge and soaps (among other things) locked. There's no way this actually helps them. It might make more sense to just not carry these products if they're being stolen so much.
- sobkas 4y ago
  > My local rite aid keeps the ice cream fridge and soaps (among other things) locked. There's no way this actually helps them. It might make more sense to just not carry these products if they're being stolen so much. An you have invented a dollar store, welcome to food desert without nutritional food and most necessary items.
  - j0hnyl 4y ago
    Is ice cream nutritional food? I live in a big city and my point is that no is waiting around to chase down the one person working so that they can unlock the cabinet/fridge for them. Often there's not even anyone to be found to do so. I can get soap across the street at the corner store in two seconds. I can get ice cream at the grocery store where it's not locked up.

wiseleo 4y ago

With sufficient staffing and instant mobile checkout, stores can implement a fully secure experience. The caveat here is "sufficient staffing" of people who can use a mobile checkout solution.

subharmonicon 4y ago
What kind of staffing are you referring to, and how does mobile checkout help this situation? At the Walgreens near where I live they sometimes have a security guard at the door, sometimes not. They only allow one of the two doors to open. If the guard isn’t there you’ll see teenagers walk in, dump a bunch of their stuff in a backpack, grab as much as they can carry, and walk out. They come back five minutes later and do it again. This is with a lot of staff on the floor, who recognize them when they come back in. The staff have likely been told not to try to stop them, because it’s a liability for Walgreens. The security does seem to help but even that doesn’t completely stop people from trying. I have seen the security follow people they recognize into the store and then end up chasing them out but the perpetrators still get away. Even more security might help to block the door in that case, but that’s the only useful mitigation I’ve seen in these cases.
phil21 4y ago
How do you imagine this working? I live a few blocks away from a Walgreens that is now closing at the end of the month. I've personally witnessed a shoplifter actively shoplifting nearly every time I was in the store over the past year to year and a half. This was a half dozen encounters at least, of varying degrees of audacity from teenagers stealing some makeup to outright crews doing a mini flash mob style raid. In every case staff (and security) were tailing them, and in one instance outright confronting them nearly to the point of physically blocking them. The shoplifters do not care - they know they cannot be touched by store employees, and they also know the police literally will not show up to the call. These are folks filling up entire baskets full of high value items for obvious resale while everyone simply lets them do it. Perhaps this is an outlier, but based on talking to employees, seeing it with my own two eyes, it's fairly clear to me Walgreens Corporate is simply walking it back and taking an L in these locations vs. bothering to step into a hyper-partisan political topic. This is a wild shift in societal norms and values from when I was working retail jobs in the mid to late 90's. We were enabled (and willing) to outright physically detain shoplifters to the point of physical restraint if they fought back. Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly. This rapidly changed towards the end of the 90's into the early 00's. Society starts failing when the answer to every problem is call mommy and daddy (the police) and stops enforcing basic societal norms by itself. We are witnessing the transition from a high trust society to a low trust society in many areas of this country.

_fat_santa 4y ago

Wallgreens is a national retailer, so excess shrinkage at one or a series of locations is offset by below average shrinkage in other locations. Just because a national retailer can absorb something like this does not mean a local retailer with many fewer locations can. It's still a massive problem, just not for national retailers.

mansion7 4y ago
Even though Walgreens is a national retailer, non-thieving locations should not be made to subsidize the thieving locations. A Walgreens in small town Illinois with extremely low shrinkage ought not see any negative effects such as price increases because other, more lax on crime cities, perpetuate an atmosphere of lawlessness and tolerance of same.
- monkeydreams 4y ago
  > Even though Walgreens is a national retailer, non-thieving locations should not be made to subsidize the thieving locations. This is all part and parcel of society, of corporations, of any multi-site organisation. Each node has its own advantages and disadvantages. High "shrinkage" sites often have high sales and a corporation that sticks to "small town Illinois" is never going to be able to offer the economies of scale of Walgreens.
  - mansion7 4y ago
    No. I can get better loan rates due to my great credit, while others who have squandered their credit do not. Similarly, criminal-coddling cities should be burdened with the higher prices that the outcomes of their voting and governance are known to deliver to them. Not unlike how SF voters continually elect politicians who tolerate human feces and needles in their streets and get just that. It would not be fair for healthy communities to have human feces and needles spread on their cities out of some misguided sense of fairness or social justice.

joemazerino 4y ago

Read the article fully. The reason for crying was the over expense on private security while the security being handicapped to actually protect property. This isn't some rebuke about crying over stolen goods.

bdcravens 4y ago
The context of where I assume you are making that conclusion from reads differently to me: they are saying they believe their security posture is excessive. > But a year later, Kehoe said Thursday that the company added too much extra security in stores. > “Probably we put in too much, and we might step back a little bit from that,” he said of security staffing. The company has found private security guards to be “largely ineffective” in deterring theft, so instead it’s putting in more police and law enforcement officers.
- blacksmith_tb 4y ago
  Yes, though that's an interesting phrase - how can the company "put in" more police / LE officers? Aren't they assigned patrols or dispatched for specific incidents?
  - bdcravens 4y ago
    Most municipalities allow companies to hire police for overtime hours in addition to their assigned duties.
    - travisjungroth 4y ago
      Which is just crazy to me. You can pay for police! In uniform! I’m in Peru at the moment and for how much more corrupt people in the US act like LATAM is, I’ve never seen a company here pay police to stand somewhere. But every Apple Store in SF I’ve been to has an officer or two in front when they’re open.
      - offlinenative 4y ago

Flatcircle 4y ago

Classic example of an article with a clickbait headline.

pvaldes 4y ago

In resume, somebody was teached again the hard lesson that people dislike buying with security breathing on their napes. Is a spiral of death. Being watched destroys the pleasant experience of browsing things. People buy just what they had in mind and exit, spending much less time in the shop looking for things that they could want to buy. Big red flag. Soon, the big store is half-empty most of the time and being the only customer in a place full of vendors is psychologically disturbing for many people. Less objects are stolen but you sell less, and soon realize that are paying more to security than the loses by shoplifting. I had seen this before when, lets call it "Computer World", decided to increase their results fighting against shoplifting. Warnings in the walls, everything in plastic cases, cameras and security sucking all the fun. They closed in three months.

Andaith 4y ago

Kinda related, but in Sydney, our grocery store "Woolworths" has been tightening the screws on the self-checkout. It started without even a weight scale. Which was really convenient to use: Take everything out of trolley -> scan -> put back in trolley -> pay & go. Then the weight scale had to be used. Then it got more strict, and you had to tell it when using your own bags. Then they had cameras near the barcode reader so you had to show the "item" when you scan the barcode otherwise it'd be like "I don't think that's a shampoo bottle, lets get a human to check". which was frustrating. Now it's even worse, they have overhead cameras analyzing you, and if you click "finished" but leave a bag in your trolley(say, just a crazy thought, from one of the 200 other shops in the shopping centre), then they say "maybe you forgot something" and a human has to come check up on you. Also if you have bags in your hands, or on the floor. I feel like they've been slowly training people... but also, it's now too cumbersome to use so I go to a person(and then complain when there's not enough people sitting at registers).

eyelidlessness 4y ago

Both of the local Walgreens I frequented previously, have just stopped… stocking stuff seemingly arbitrarily? Like lots of it. If you want milk, you’ll get whatever they have in stock or nothing at all. I don’t think they were being robbed of milk. But a broken window and you’re lucky if you can find milk is what they’ve decided to do. Same goes for a bunch of other products not being stolen en masse in any timeframe.