7 ms·

Walgreens Executive Says Shoplifting Threat in San Francisco Was Overstated

71 points by jrochkind1 4y ago

sn0w_crash 4y ago
Then remove the plastic cases protecting all of the aisle items in the store.
- Our_Benefactors 4y ago
  Or, the threat was overstated because the product was protected. Don’t hold your breath for a trend reversal in SF.
  - ViViDboarder 4y ago
    Until the plastic results in loss of sales because people don’t want to bother, we probably won’t see it reversed. The cost is sunk. Why wouldn’t they leave it, even if ineffective, as long as it doesn’t cost them anything?
    - stryker7001 4y ago
      Stores have thought of this, and know the effects already. Apparently putting products behind glass causes almost a 50% drop in sales( because people don’t want to bother), so stores would prefer not to put anything behind glass or a counter, but they do because the alternative is 100% loss from theft.
- tbatchelli 4y ago
  At this point it would be better if they moved back to pre-self-service stores, and have the product behind a counter, and store clerks that will get you what you ask. As things are now, it’s the worse of both worlds: you still need a clerk to get the product, but instead of once, you need to buzz and wait once per aisle. A byproduct of this is that the smash and grabs would decrease, as there is no direct access to the product. Or to put it differently, maybe the format of stores where the product is all available and you can walk out freely was chosen because it decreased costs, even accounting for lossage. Now that lossage has increased, they should rethink the format.
  - welshwelsh 4y ago
    Making employees manually fetch products is not a solution. That's way too labor intensive, and there's no excuse to make people waste their time doing menial labor like that in today's world. I like what Amazon has in their Fresh stores, where you use a credit card to enter and an automated system tracks what you take and sends you the bill.
    - tbatchelli 4y ago
      My argument is not wether this was optimal by any metric; my argument is that they are already having employers go around the store opening cabinets, many times multiple times for the same customer. That incurs in the same menial work as having everything behind the counter, and is also a worse experience (at least for me). Can’t comment on the Amazon Fresh approach. Not sure if the costs are lower, for example. It could be that they are operating at a huge loss already.
  - StrictDabbler 4y ago
    That is the new model. You order on the app and pick up your items or have them delivered. The other day I visited a target and half the merchandise was behind plastic walls. I walked right back out and they lost a few hundred dollars in sales, but the pick-up/delivery employees have their own keys to those plastic doors. Eventually every store will just be an Amazon warehouse. The economic pressure (and by extension, ecological pressure) is simply in that direction.
wcunning 4y ago
https://archive.ph/MLegV https://archive.ph/MLegV
smcg 4y ago
Hung-Chung Su, an associate professor of operations management at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, said that while Mr. Kehoe spoke positively about the decrease in theft, 2.5 percent shrinkage is still a problem for the company. Based on Dr. Su’s research, retailers rely too much on technology to prevent theft. “If you really want to reduce retail shrinkage or retail theft, it ultimately comes down to the employees,” Dr. Su said. “But during the pandemic, the employee turnover at retail stores increased. People found better jobs, better-paying jobs.”
- notadev 4y ago
  Also most chains make it policy that staff can’t intervene. There was a viral story some years back where a woman working loss-prevention at Best Buy prevented a thief from getting out of the store with stolen goods only to be fired. There was a more recent video where nearly the whole sales floor at a Best Buy banded together to stop snatch-and-grab thieves. The Internet loved it, but it was expected they’d all eventually get fired as well.
  - fineIllregister 4y ago
    This is a good thing. Companies reap the benefit of loss prevention actions, they should also have to face the liability when things go wrong. Best Buy has staff that absolutely can stop shop lifters, just not in all stores at all times. Why? Because those employees require special training to do so safely, and companies know it is cheaper to let people steal than provide that training to all employees. The incentives are properly aligned. If a company could force their employees to intervene with no training and no regard to potential harm to the employee, they would all do so.
    - nobodyandproud 4y ago
      This is bean-counter logic, due to insufficient data. How do you quantify the value of a neighborhood that is intolerant of theft vs one that is tolerant?
      - deleted 4y ago
water554 4y ago
The fact that I have to pay $4 for a gatorade says otherwise
- ViViDboarder 4y ago
  That’s because San Francisco is expensive. A sandwich with no sides at many places downtown is more than $10 and I’m pretty sure it’s not organized shoplifting…
- pmulard 4y ago
  You pay $4 for a Gatorade because of how expensive the labor (store staff) and rent are. San Francisco would be much cheaper if it didn’t cost 5 grand a month to rent a tiny store front.
  - sieabahlpark 4y ago
    You think it only costs 5k?
    - MrFoof 4y ago
      This. My barber rents about 600 square feet in Boston near a major college, and that is $8000/mo. And that’s a good deal considering both the area and that he’s always had so much business he’s forever booked solid. Folks, actually go look into how much commercial retail (not office space!) real estate costs in the nice, busy parts of your area. It’s an eye opener. Food service is even more. Then NYC (especially!), SF, DC, Seattle and Boston can be positively withering.
Pigalowda 4y ago
So everything is totally fine? I guess things in SF must be better than Seattle.
- chrsig 4y ago
  ...are "the city is burning down" and "everything is fine" the only states you think of? "Overstated" doesn't mean everything's fine, it means that it wasn't as bad as they made it out to be.
  - Pigalowda 4y ago
    Well i didn’t say “The city is burning down” but now that you say it I kinda like it. Fentanyl fuels filch fire in filthy San Fran.
carapace 4y ago
I call BS on this article. I'm an SF-grown left-leaning SJW type, and this seems like propaganda to me. Yes, the exec said, “Maybe we cried too much last year,” but that's all he said. If you listen to him in full, instead of taking one phrase out of context, it's clear that he's not making some big admission or anything like that. > It was a remarkable admission, retail experts said. Which experts? - - - - I've lived here all my life, nearly half a century now, and things have never been like this. There are tent cities, people shooting up in the Muni stations and on the street, actual human feces on the sidewalk. The Tenderloin in particular has become a lawless zone, even the longtime residents are scared. This town has always been nuts, and even a little dangerous, since the Gold Rush, but at least it was fun. What we're seeing today is dystopian. If the Progressive bloc can't see their own problems they're not going to be able to make, uh, progress. Progressives insist that the recall of Boudin was all due to Republicans and the Police, they ignored democrats and particularly the Asian-American political bloc and told us that we were tricked by the nasty R's and the lying police! (Asian American political groups in SF were against Boudin because they believed he was soft on anti-Asian hate crime in the wake of the pandemic & lockdowns. A lot of Democrats just felt that he wasn't able to do his job. Some of that because the rank-and-file cops didn't like him, but mostly because he was kinda nuts.) - - - - Anyway, two things can be true: Walgreens overestimated and overstated how bad shoplifting was, and shoplifting and crime is a big problem in SF right now.
- anikom15 4y ago
  How many Republicans are even in SF? LA runs political ads blaming Republicans for everything bad around here, but there aren’t Republican politicians. There are only Republican voters…. At some point the argument starts to look ridiculous.
  - carapace 4y ago
    https://www.sfelections.org/tools/election_data/ https://www.sfelections.org/tools/election_data/ Registration by Party ... Democratic 317,109 Republican 33,778 So D's outnumber R's here by roughly 10:1. Interestingly: No Party Preference/Unknown 133,810
vineyardmike 4y ago
I haven’t seen it widely reported, but Walgreens claimed they lost money due to “crime”. In financial statements they clarified that meant the several billion dollar fines they had to pay due to some combination of (1) the opioid settlements (2) illegal wage theft against their employees. Stolen merchandise wasn’t a big contributor to bottom line. They lost money due to white collar and labor crimes, while throwing places like SF under the bus for news cycles and talking points. SF the city challenged Walgreens on the theft issue, since the police don’t have many reported thefts from Walgreens in the city. Which is a pattern. The clothing store that was reported to close after crazy amounts of crime quietly opened its SF branch a few days later (with free Police guards and press cycles). https://qz.com/walgreens-opioid-settlement-cost-loss-first-quarter-1849957513 https://qz.com/walgreens-opioid-settlement-cost-loss-first-q... https://abc7news.com/cotopaxi-san-francisco-reopens-founder-davis-smith-linkedin-apology-hayes-valley-store-ceo/12440774/ https://abc7news.com/cotopaxi-san-francisco-reopens-founder-...
- zackees 4y ago
  [dead]

71 points by jrochkind1 4y ago

sn0w_crash 4y ago

Then remove the plastic cases protecting all of the aisle items in the store.

Our_Benefactors 4y ago
Or, the threat was overstated because the product was protected. Don’t hold your breath for a trend reversal in SF.
- ViViDboarder 4y ago
  Until the plastic results in loss of sales because people don’t want to bother, we probably won’t see it reversed. The cost is sunk. Why wouldn’t they leave it, even if ineffective, as long as it doesn’t cost them anything?
  - stryker7001 4y ago
    Stores have thought of this, and know the effects already. Apparently putting products behind glass causes almost a 50% drop in sales( because people don’t want to bother), so stores would prefer not to put anything behind glass or a counter, but they do because the alternative is 100% loss from theft.
tbatchelli 4y ago
At this point it would be better if they moved back to pre-self-service stores, and have the product behind a counter, and store clerks that will get you what you ask. As things are now, it’s the worse of both worlds: you still need a clerk to get the product, but instead of once, you need to buzz and wait once per aisle. A byproduct of this is that the smash and grabs would decrease, as there is no direct access to the product. Or to put it differently, maybe the format of stores where the product is all available and you can walk out freely was chosen because it decreased costs, even accounting for lossage. Now that lossage has increased, they should rethink the format.
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  Making employees manually fetch products is not a solution. That's way too labor intensive, and there's no excuse to make people waste their time doing menial labor like that in today's world. I like what Amazon has in their Fresh stores, where you use a credit card to enter and an automated system tracks what you take and sends you the bill.
  - tbatchelli 4y ago
    My argument is not wether this was optimal by any metric; my argument is that they are already having employers go around the store opening cabinets, many times multiple times for the same customer. That incurs in the same menial work as having everything behind the counter, and is also a worse experience (at least for me). Can’t comment on the Amazon Fresh approach. Not sure if the costs are lower, for example. It could be that they are operating at a huge loss already.
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  That is the new model. You order on the app and pick up your items or have them delivered. The other day I visited a target and half the merchandise was behind plastic walls. I walked right back out and they lost a few hundred dollars in sales, but the pick-up/delivery employees have their own keys to those plastic doors. Eventually every store will just be an Amazon warehouse. The economic pressure (and by extension, ecological pressure) is simply in that direction.

wcunning 4y ago

https://archive.ph/MLegV https://archive.ph/MLegV

smcg 4y ago

Hung-Chung Su, an associate professor of operations management at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, said that while Mr. Kehoe spoke positively about the decrease in theft, 2.5 percent shrinkage is still a problem for the company. Based on Dr. Su’s research, retailers rely too much on technology to prevent theft. “If you really want to reduce retail shrinkage or retail theft, it ultimately comes down to the employees,” Dr. Su said. “But during the pandemic, the employee turnover at retail stores increased. People found better jobs, better-paying jobs.”

notadev 4y ago
Also most chains make it policy that staff can’t intervene. There was a viral story some years back where a woman working loss-prevention at Best Buy prevented a thief from getting out of the store with stolen goods only to be fired. There was a more recent video where nearly the whole sales floor at a Best Buy banded together to stop snatch-and-grab thieves. The Internet loved it, but it was expected they’d all eventually get fired as well.
- fineIllregister 4y ago
  This is a good thing. Companies reap the benefit of loss prevention actions, they should also have to face the liability when things go wrong. Best Buy has staff that absolutely can stop shop lifters, just not in all stores at all times. Why? Because those employees require special training to do so safely, and companies know it is cheaper to let people steal than provide that training to all employees. The incentives are properly aligned. If a company could force their employees to intervene with no training and no regard to potential harm to the employee, they would all do so.
  - nobodyandproud 4y ago
    This is bean-counter logic, due to insufficient data. How do you quantify the value of a neighborhood that is intolerant of theft vs one that is tolerant?
    - deleted 4y ago

water554 4y ago

The fact that I have to pay $4 for a gatorade says otherwise

ViViDboarder 4y ago
That’s because San Francisco is expensive. A sandwich with no sides at many places downtown is more than $10 and I’m pretty sure it’s not organized shoplifting…
pmulard 4y ago
You pay $4 for a Gatorade because of how expensive the labor (store staff) and rent are. San Francisco would be much cheaper if it didn’t cost 5 grand a month to rent a tiny store front.
- sieabahlpark 4y ago
  You think it only costs 5k?
  - MrFoof 4y ago
    This. My barber rents about 600 square feet in Boston near a major college, and that is $8000/mo. And that’s a good deal considering both the area and that he’s always had so much business he’s forever booked solid. Folks, actually go look into how much commercial retail (not office space!) real estate costs in the nice, busy parts of your area. It’s an eye opener. Food service is even more. Then NYC (especially!), SF, DC, Seattle and Boston can be positively withering.

Pigalowda 4y ago

So everything is totally fine? I guess things in SF must be better than Seattle.

chrsig 4y ago
...are "the city is burning down" and "everything is fine" the only states you think of? "Overstated" doesn't mean everything's fine, it means that it wasn't as bad as they made it out to be.
- Pigalowda 4y ago
  Well i didn’t say “The city is burning down” but now that you say it I kinda like it. Fentanyl fuels filch fire in filthy San Fran.

carapace 4y ago

I call BS on this article. I'm an SF-grown left-leaning SJW type, and this seems like propaganda to me. Yes, the exec said, “Maybe we cried too much last year,” but that's all he said. If you listen to him in full, instead of taking one phrase out of context, it's clear that he's not making some big admission or anything like that. > It was a remarkable admission, retail experts said. Which experts? - - - - I've lived here all my life, nearly half a century now, and things have never been like this. There are tent cities, people shooting up in the Muni stations and on the street, actual human feces on the sidewalk. The Tenderloin in particular has become a lawless zone, even the longtime residents are scared. This town has always been nuts, and even a little dangerous, since the Gold Rush, but at least it was fun. What we're seeing today is dystopian. If the Progressive bloc can't see their own problems they're not going to be able to make, uh, progress. Progressives insist that the recall of Boudin was all due to Republicans and the Police, they ignored democrats and particularly the Asian-American political bloc and told us that we were tricked by the nasty R's and the lying police! (Asian American political groups in SF were against Boudin because they believed he was soft on anti-Asian hate crime in the wake of the pandemic & lockdowns. A lot of Democrats just felt that he wasn't able to do his job. Some of that because the rank-and-file cops didn't like him, but mostly because he was kinda nuts.) - - - - Anyway, two things can be true: Walgreens overestimated and overstated how bad shoplifting was, and shoplifting and crime is a big problem in SF right now.

anikom15 4y ago
How many Republicans are even in SF? LA runs political ads blaming Republicans for everything bad around here, but there aren’t Republican politicians. There are only Republican voters…. At some point the argument starts to look ridiculous.
- carapace 4y ago
  https://www.sfelections.org/tools/election_data/ https://www.sfelections.org/tools/election_data/ Registration by Party ... Democratic 317,109 Republican 33,778 So D's outnumber R's here by roughly 10:1. Interestingly: No Party Preference/Unknown 133,810

vineyardmike 4y ago

I haven’t seen it widely reported, but Walgreens claimed they lost money due to “crime”. In financial statements they clarified that meant the several billion dollar fines they had to pay due to some combination of (1) the opioid settlements (2) illegal wage theft against their employees. Stolen merchandise wasn’t a big contributor to bottom line. They lost money due to white collar and labor crimes, while throwing places like SF under the bus for news cycles and talking points. SF the city challenged Walgreens on the theft issue, since the police don’t have many reported thefts from Walgreens in the city. Which is a pattern. The clothing store that was reported to close after crazy amounts of crime quietly opened its SF branch a few days later (with free Police guards and press cycles). https://qz.com/walgreens-opioid-settlement-cost-loss-first-quarter-1849957513 https://qz.com/walgreens-opioid-settlement-cost-loss-first-q... https://abc7news.com/cotopaxi-san-francisco-reopens-founder-davis-smith-linkedin-apology-hayes-valley-store-ceo/12440774/ https://abc7news.com/cotopaxi-san-francisco-reopens-founder-...

zackees 4y ago
[dead]