Turns Out Anti-Shoplifting Measures Are Also Anti-Sales Measures!

This is in no way surprising!

Sep 24, 2024

Since pandemic times, we have been in the midst of a moral panic over a supposedly massive shoplifting problem that may or may not actually exist. Hoping to find a solution to the issue, many stores started locking up their merchandise and requiring customers to ask a sales associate to unlock things they wish to purchase.

However, it seems that not only are these moves a deterrent to shoplifting, they are also a deterrent to sales. According to a recent reader survey conducted by Consumer World, two out of three shoppers say they won’t bother asking a sales associate to open a case to get something they want.

Thirty-two percent said they would bother asking a sales associate to free their items, but 13 percent said they’d try to find a similar product that wasn’t locked up, while 55 percent said they’d go elsewhere.

These results, while not entirely scientific given that it was an opt-in survey, are not surprising. Good merchandising matters and can drive sales, so it certainly follows that making it extremely inconvenient to buy something is not going to help matters much. I can honestly say I have only ever asked an employee to open a case like that for me once, and it was to get a bottle of Aperol, which was obviously a necessity. I mean … have you tried to find an employee at CVS or Walgreens to help you with anything in the last few years? Because I have, and it’s not easy — which, by the way, is exactly why they have shoplifting problems in the first place. Good customer service is the best loss prevention strategy there is.

The real issue is that there is a tight jobs market and these stores can’t find people to work for next to nothing anymore. They wanted to get out of having to do that — so, at first, they figured, “Eh! What do we need employees for, anyway? Surely they’re mostly decorative!” But that didn’t work out so well because some people took advantage of that and did some shoplifting — though, again, nowhere near as much shoplifting as these places claimed. Then they figured, “Okay, well, to put a stop to the shoplifting, we’ll just lock all of the stuff up!”

Soon they’ll figure out that if they lock stuff up, people won’t bother to take the extra step to ask an employee to unlock it and their sales will go down. This is just human nature. The more steps you put in front of someone, the less likely they are to actually do a given thing — especially if it’s not something they need or desperately want. Because with each additional step, they have to ask themselves, “Do I really care that much?” and a lot of the time, the answer is gonna be “I really don’t.”

On the other end, the easier you make things on customers, the more they spend. That’s why there are impulse buys near the register, that’s why stores are merchandised a particular way, and that’s why mannequins exist. Do you have any idea how many people come into a store and buy what the mannequin is wearing, accessories and all? So many people!

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What these companies want is to have their cake and eat it, too. They want the same levels of sales and shrinkage with skeleton crews as they had with a full staff — because obviously that means more profit for those up top and for shareholders. But that’s just not going to happen. There’s no special code to crack, they just need to figure out what it is that they are willing to deal with — a higher payroll, shoplifters, or lower sales — and let that be the end of it.

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