It used to be that retail stores locked up only items that were pricey or regulated, such as phones or cigarettes. Today, however, everything from toothpaste to deodorant gets locked up behind plexiglass cases, writes Amanda Mull at Bloomberg. In theory, a customer presses a call button to quickly summon a worker with a key. In reality, this takes forever—often so long that frustrated customers give up and walk out—and all for a lousy bottle of shampoo or laundry detergent. Stores such as Target, CVS, and Walgreens say the locked cases are a necessary response to rising theft, but Mull is skeptical and traces the trend back to the "Great Shoplifting Freak-Out of 2021" in which retailers made shoplifting-is-killing-us claims but didn't actually provide the numbers to back them up.
Smash-and-grab robberies may go viral on social media, she writes, but they account for a small fraction of retail theft. Criminals who break into warehouses or trucks are the bigger problem, and plastic cases in stores won't fix that. Nevertheless, chains have invested a lot of money in these cases, and the strategy "appears to be backfiring," writes Mull. Instead of reduced theft, stores have stressed employees and ticked-off customers wishing they had shopped online. "The modern American store is designed around self-service, which encourages customers to buy more," writes Mull. "If you can't just grab most of the things you want, the brick-and-mortar retail system as we know it stops working." (Read the full piece, in which Mull tries to make sense of why some products get locked up and others don't. Spoiler alert: It's a futile effort.)
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