How Locked Shelves Broke Shopping

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2:04But you get slowed down because that deodorant is locked up. Trying to get some deodorant. I've been waiting three minutes. You can't even get socks because it's locked. Since when are soft caramels a controlled substance? This is the plight of the modern shopper. If you've tried to buy something in person at a retailer like Target or CVS in the past few years, you've probably noticed that more and more everyday items, from deodorant to soft caramels, seem to be barricaded behind plastic shields.

2:37Amanda Mull:If you're in a location where corporate leadership has decided that stuff needs to be locked up in those stores, it can be almost anything that you find behind lock and key. Bloomberg's Amanda Moll has been closely following this retail trend. She says it's been around for a while, but it really took off in the U.S. in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic. But four years later, Amanda says there's little evidence that locking up essentials has done retailers any good. And now there's more and more evidence that the practice might be backfiring. Because when you lock things up, for example, you don't sell as many of them.

3:11Amanda Mull:We've kind of proven that pretty conclusively. That was Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth on an earnings call in January. It was a surprising admission. Because locking up items started off as a move that a lot of companies adopted as part of a broader fight against shoplifting. And now... He acknowledged that locking stuff up has hurt the retailer. It has reduced sales. It has annoyed customers. It has driven people to shop elsewhere. So where does that leave shoppers on a hot, busy day? Will your body wash stay behind lock and key? Will that Olay ever see the light of day? I had to keep pressing the button of, like, assistance needed for people who smell bad.

3:54And over and over, and no one ever came. No one ever came. What?

4:03This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. Today on the show, the consequences of the retail lockup era. How the trend caught on, what it would take for it to end, and how it's already changed the way we shop.

4:22When did you first start to see items locked up on store shelves?

4:28Amanda Mull:Locking up certain types of things in certain types of stores goes back to like when I was working at Best Buy in college in the mid 2000s. There has for a really long time been like very particular products that are like a high theft risk because they're small, they're valuable, they're in high demand. Like what? When I was there, it was a lot of like PlayStation games. Now you see a lot of expensive cell phone accessories, sometimes phone chargers, things that are easy to conceal, it would be easy to flip. These days, Amanda covers retail and writes a column about consumer culture for Business Week.

5:02Since her college days at Best Buy, stores have changed pretty significantly. Amanda says they're not just locking up small, expensive electronic products. They're locking up everything.

5:14Amanda Mull:At a particular Target, I found men's underwear, men's socks, all kinds of cleaning products, laundry detergent, mops, shampoo, body wash. I've seen like shower puffs locked up, which cost like a dollar. Sometimes you walk down a certain aisle and the entire aisle on both sides is fully encased in plexiglass and locked. So the average value of stuff being locked up is on a lot of these aisles less than$10. Amanda says this new age of retail lockups where anything and everything is fair game took off in earnest coming out of the pandemic. In 2021, I wrote about what I called at the time the great shoplifting freak out, which was this sort of like generalized media panic about what they termed as like increased rates of theft from retail stores.

6:04Amanda Mull:There were like a couple of videos that went viral showing, you know, groups of people rushing into there was a Nordstrom in California. there are a couple like famous videos of this. And that all got sort of spun into this idea that retailers are at the mercy of the sort of lawless public. And if you think about what 2021 was like in the U.S., there was like a real sense of general unease coming out of the pandemic and people being nervous about going out again. And a lot of people got really used to shopping online. So it tapped into this like generalized anxiety about the outside world. Whether this shoplifting panic was backed up by concrete evidence, Amanda says, is another story.

6:44Amanda Mull:There's not a lot of good data available on theft rates. Often these numbers are released by like industry lobby groups and people who are trying to demonstrate a phenomenon that they believe is happening from surveys that ask retail management how they feel about shoplifting, how they feel about certain types of product loss as a threat to their business. It is very squishy. Feelings are a lot different than numbers. Yes. They're asking about perception instead of asking for proof. These stores do keep tabs on what they call shrinkage. Which is the industry term for inventory that's lost and cannot be sold for any cause.

7:24Amanda Mull:And that can be cargo theft. It can be employee theft. It can be shoplifting. It can be checkout errors. It can be paperwork errors. It can be missed delivery. You get spoilage, damage. Kind of like the cost of doing business. Right. You can lose inventory in like a zillion ways. But like over the past like 15 or 20 years, the shrink rate in U.S. retail is like pretty stable. That generally hovers at about 1.5 percent. So if you are a retailer on average, you're going to lose about one and a half percent of your sellable inventory to something that is like sort of beyond your control. So that shrink rate hasn't changed much.

8:00It's a similar amount of inventory lost over the last few decades. But Amanda says what has changed is the number of employees stocking the shelves.

8:10Amanda Mull:Something that's really important to understand about retail stores in the U.S., especially retailers that sell sort of like low-dollar, everyday essential types of things, drugstores, big-box stores, is that they are almost entirely like woefully understaffed. It is really hard to staff these stores because the jobs themselves just aren't very good. They don't pay very well. Their hours are not predictable. You're on your feet all day. You may or may not get benefits. So retailers are understaffed. And over the years, retailers have cut staffing even further. And that is like sort of an ideological thing.

8:47Amanda Mull:Like retailers really love to reduce labor costs. And that after a certain point just means having fewer workers. So when you get to that point, it becomes really hard to manage a store well. So what retailers have done is sort of retrofit stores with systems that mean, in their minds, that they can run a store with fewer employees. That's what self-checkout is. And that's what these locked up shelves are. And that great shoplifting freakout of 2021, Amanda says it just helped justify these sorts of measures. If retailers can't and won't hire more people, then what they're going to have to do is justify the sort of externalities of these staffing choices.

9:29Amanda Mull:So you lose the essential functions of the store and more of the labor of running the store is put on the customer. And it's really convenient to have sort of an external threat that has forced you to do these things rather than your own management decisions that has forced you to do these things. That's so interesting. So basically, stores stopped hiring people at the same rate to do the work of actually staffing these stores, helping people with checkout and keeping an eye on things, making sure people weren't stealing goods. And so instead of hiring more people, they installed more plexiglass.

10:03Yes. And when you do that, you get some externalities. Externalities that you're probably familiar with.

10:09Amanda Mull:You press the button. Nobody comes. You press the button again. You know, it's been five minutes, 10 minutes. You've got to go back to work. You're on your lunch break. You just leave. Social media is filled with angry customers complaining that locked shelves have ruined their shopping experience. It took me 15 minutes to get somebody to come over to get some laundry soap. This turned into a 30-minute ordeal just to get facial cleanser. It is one of the fundamental building blocks of modern life in the United States that these stores work. And when they stop working, people get really mad. Because you want to pop in, get your toothpaste, and leave.

10:44Amanda Mull:Right. It is a situation in which something that should be easy, something that has been easy for decades, becomes totally unworkable. How have shoppers reacted to these changes? They reacted by moving their consumption of these items to a different retailer. So it's been a boon for grocery stores because a lot of them carry these same goods. And it's been a big boon for online retailers. It's hurting retail employees, too, who are good at reducing all kinds of shrink. Not just elusive shoplifters, but self-checkout issues and paperwork errors. tracking shipments that arrive with only 19 bars of soap instead of 20.

11:18Amanda Mull:The retail employees that I've talked to sort of uniformly hate this system. Your employer is making you run around like a chicken with your head cut off to, like, unlock cabinets of moisturizer or whatever. So you're forcing out people who are your best workers in most cases, and you're just going to lose product in, like, so many different ways. The store is going to leak like a sieve. So customers aren't happy, employees aren't happy, and companies' bottom lines are taking a hit too. More on that and what they're doing about it after the break.

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14:27On top of alienating customers and annoying employees, locked up shelves at retail stores have not exactly been good for business.

14:36Amanda Mull:I think Walgreens and CVS in particular, if you look at their financial results over the past few years, like it's not been great. They are two companies in a situation where they really do need to figure out how to gain back some customer loyalty and encourage more foot traffic into their stores and things like that. Amanda says the first domino to fall was Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth's admission on an earnings call that this policy had hurt sales, that locking things up made them harder to buy. because when you lock things up, for example, you don't sell as many of them. We've kind of proven that pretty conclusively.

15:11How big was that to hear that from him?

15:13Amanda Mull:It was huge. This is a topic that retailers do not want to talk about because they know that the general public hates this. And so hearing a CEO of one of the main culprits in this phenomenon say like, hey, we understand that this is bad, that this is not a benefit to customers, that something's got to give here, that we are turning away shoppers. It was one of the few, like, rare public acknowledgements that, like, this system is bad. We got to figure out something else to do here. In March, Walgreens agreed to a sale. It will go private after years of shrinking profit margins and a volatile stock price.

15:51Slumping retail sales didn't help. It's not the only company that's looking closer at its lockup strategy. A few weeks after that Walgreens earnings call came news from CVS.

16:03Amanda Mull:CVS announced that it was expanding a pilot program that it had been running quietly in a couple of New York City stores. What it does is allow people with the CVS Health app on their phones to unlock certain cabinets themselves. Do you think it'll work? Well, I think that the theory is that they're going to have your name, your information, like you are a known quantity to them. So it takes an element of anonymity out of opening those shelves and could potentially be a way to move the middleman, which is the employee with the big key ring, out of these transactions in a way that helps the store run a little bit more smoothly.

16:43It's not quite removing the locked shelves altogether. But Amanda says it's essentially a way to walk back the policy and put more control in consumers' hands.

16:53Amanda Mull:I think that they understand that they have like overcorrected or gone too far in like how these programs were implemented and they can't like fully walk them back. Because it's just too expensive to rip up your work? It's too expensive and also it signals failure. Like you have to sort of present to the investing public like the idea that like, oh, like the numbers aren't great, but this is working because if you rip all that stuff out, then people have other questions. CVS appears to be doubling down on its app-based unlock system. A company spokesperson told us they plan to introduce it in other communities this year.

17:32On social media, people have raised privacy concerns about the data the app collects because it requires customers to sign in to use it. CVS said it, quote, complies with all applicable regulations to protect customer information. For customers who prefer not to scan the app, assistance is available to unlock the merchandise. So we're not necessarily going to see our locked up socks unleashed overnight. But not because keeping them behind plexiglass is the best way to deter theft.

18:01Amanda Mull:The best way to deter theft, like this has been studied, is to properly staff your stores. To make people who might be thinking about stealing something feel like they're going to be seen, they're going to be caught. They cannot just go in there undetected and walk out with whatever they want. What do you think the future of shopping might look like at places where these lockups have been so central? Stores in that arena are probably going to feel more and more like vending machines. I went to a retail conference recently where there was a lot of exhibitors with third-party vendors that sell technology solutions for automating more things within stores that make it possible for a customer to unlock something themselves, that makes it easier to track customers in stores and identify people that do all of the stuff that seems to be bent toward automating a lot of these things or putting more things on the customer's plate to do themselves.

18:59Amanda Mull:I think there's been like a re-estimation of the value of like a good in-store experience and a lot of other types of retailers. And I think this has been a pretty effective cautionary tale because like the level of ire and the level of anger that is directed toward retailers that do this and the level of like grudge holding that people will do against these retailers, I think has been instructive for other retailers to say, all right, we know what not to do.

19:28This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. The show is hosted by me, David Gura, Wan Ha, and Saleha Mosen. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Eleanor Harrison Dengate, Patty Hirsch, Rachel Lewis-Kriskie, Naomi Ng, Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Sugiura, Julia Weaver, Yang Yang, and Taka Yasuzawa. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Monday.