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

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.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  The "amount" of shoplifting you see while stores continue to REDUCE attempts to intervene should show you just how much of a non-issue shoplifting is to most businesses. It's more expensive for a company to pay for insurance that would cover an employee being injured trying to detain a theif or pay for an actual security guard than just to say "fuck it" to a small percentage of goods. Average shrinkage for retail is like 2%. A permanent security guard would cost like $60k to $100k a year, and yet is still super uncommon. >Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly. Prosecutors still have your backs. The idea of NOT prosecuting a shoplifter is pretty much a non-consideration anywhere, and even in the small part of california that people claimed the DA did prosecute saw them voted out. It's police that just seem to ignore crime in some jurisdictions. In my local supermarket growing up, the store manager and local police RELISHED going after shoplifters. It was stupid easy, a few cameras and a bored officer is all it takes.
  - mancerayder 4y ago
    This is actually false. There are security guards in all the non-mom-and-pop pharmacies in Manhattan. Clearly it's worth it to pay for a guy to sit in a chair by the door as a (very loose) disincentive to steal.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      I don't know what to tell you then. My father was the assistant manager of our local supermarket for 10 years, after being a sub-department manager for 20. In the many years he has bragged about making that store's shrinkage the smallest in the state, including being befriended by the CEO of the international company that had a partnership with the stores in the state and eventually bought them all, he never once talked about shoplifting as a driver of that shrinkage. It was ALWAYS waste, or backroom theft, or poor stock handling and planning. This was also in a dirt poor community where small time crime was a regular thing for most people, think "White trash" area. This anecdote should clearly not be generalized to the entire country, but average retail shrinkage is supposedly around 2% which includes pretty much any reason you can think of, including someone returning a box of bricks instead of the product, a minimum wage employee dropping a bottle of soda, a customer putting the frozen peas on a random shelf instead of back in the freezer, etc. Shoplifting as something that harms a store's income is an extremely local thing IMO.

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.

mrguyorama 4y ago
The "amount" of shoplifting you see while stores continue to REDUCE attempts to intervene should show you just how much of a non-issue shoplifting is to most businesses. It's more expensive for a company to pay for insurance that would cover an employee being injured trying to detain a theif or pay for an actual security guard than just to say "fuck it" to a small percentage of goods. Average shrinkage for retail is like 2%. A permanent security guard would cost like $60k to $100k a year, and yet is still super uncommon. >Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly. Prosecutors still have your backs. The idea of NOT prosecuting a shoplifter is pretty much a non-consideration anywhere, and even in the small part of california that people claimed the DA did prosecute saw them voted out. It's police that just seem to ignore crime in some jurisdictions. In my local supermarket growing up, the store manager and local police RELISHED going after shoplifters. It was stupid easy, a few cameras and a bored officer is all it takes.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  This is actually false. There are security guards in all the non-mom-and-pop pharmacies in Manhattan. Clearly it's worth it to pay for a guy to sit in a chair by the door as a (very loose) disincentive to steal.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    I don't know what to tell you then. My father was the assistant manager of our local supermarket for 10 years, after being a sub-department manager for 20. In the many years he has bragged about making that store's shrinkage the smallest in the state, including being befriended by the CEO of the international company that had a partnership with the stores in the state and eventually bought them all, he never once talked about shoplifting as a driver of that shrinkage. It was ALWAYS waste, or backroom theft, or poor stock handling and planning. This was also in a dirt poor community where small time crime was a regular thing for most people, think "White trash" area. This anecdote should clearly not be generalized to the entire country, but average retail shrinkage is supposedly around 2% which includes pretty much any reason you can think of, including someone returning a box of bricks instead of the product, a minimum wage employee dropping a bottle of soda, a customer putting the frozen peas on a random shelf instead of back in the freezer, etc. Shoplifting as something that harms a store's income is an extremely local thing IMO.