Yeah, I end up still using their pharmacy because the pharmacist is just a great guy and he takes care of people. But the rest of the store can fuck right off.

That's like years ago, like 2016, I went to Walmart for the last time. They closed all the self checkout lanes, but I guess forgot to rehire cashiers. So I waited 30 minutes in line on a random weekday to buy one 50ft extension cord.

Fun fact, next time you need something like that on the road just find a Dollar General. There's one approximately every nine feet (they're the retailer with the most locations in the US, bar none) and Dollar General don't give a fuck, therefore nothing is locked up there. Some stuff is behind the checkout counter, but that's all. Dollar General also doesn't care about you stealing the nail clippers, nor paying any employees to be present, nor much of anything else as far as I can tell.

It's the fucking worst. Say I need a toothbrush, new mascara, and cough syrup. That's gonna be at least 10 minutes waiting for the one overworked staff member to unlock the case at each of them.

paywalled

Headline is right.
'When you lock things up…you don't sell as many of them’

Reminder, using the reader function in Firefox skips almost all pay walls.

Archive copy of the Fortune article: https://archive.is/PoraP

If theft is this bad, these stores should just switch back to the traditional model used by pharmacies and general stores. Consider this photo of a traditional pharmacy:

Or this old general store:

This is what these businesses used to look like. In traditional pharmacies and general stores, most goods were kept behind counters or at the very least within direct view of those behind counters. A traditional dry good store might literally just be a big counter in the front with a huge warehouse in the back. You show up with a list of goods you want, and the clerk would run into the back and grab everything you wanted.

The model of a store with aisles that customers wander through is not the historical norm. As industrialization improved, the relative costs of goods lowered, while the relative cost of labor increased. So it made sense for stores to accept a higher level of theft and shopliting by offloading the item-picking process to their customers. They got the customers to do a lot of the work for them, but in exchange they accepted a higher level of theft.

Now they're trying to have things both ways. They still want customers to do all the work of picking out their purchases from the shelves, but they've decided they don't like the level of shoplifting that level of low labor cost business inevitably produces. They want the customers to do most of the labor of clerks, but they don't want to accept the level of theft that inevitably produces.

Reminds me of getting the guy to unlock the video game and he hands me the game thinking we are gonna go ring it up, and I am just standing reading the back of the case, only to put it back and ask for another one.

Just ends up being me and Walmart bro shopping for a game together

The one employee in the entire store is busy at checkout. I'm just gonna order it on Amazon.

If they had more than 2 people working at a time

I don't live in America but judging from what I heard, what is up with American stores manning the shops at bare minimum? Like, I heard so many complaints of self-service checkouts having no one staff looking after them, which leads to customers going to manned tills instead, because they couldn't deal with technical issues especially for the seniors. Then when a senior is asked if they want to use automated checkouts instead, they reply with the snarky response "I don't work here." You can't blame people for being reluctant to use the self-service checkouts, if there are no help! Where I live, there is always a staff looking after the self-service checkouts because of the inevitable technical issues or customers not knowing how to use them.

My guess for this poor implementation of technology is because bosses think machines are meant to replace humans as workers, when realistically machines should help people with work. We don't live in yet in a world where there are robots with the artifical intelligence as good as the human intelligence. And we are still way far from having robots with good dexterity skills as humans to completely replace us.

That's horrible and CVS deserves to lose your business, butI promise you that, unless it was the store manager you told, that employee absolutely did not care and didn't tell anyone who did care. That's just a consequence of divorcing ownership of businesses from employment. I swear to you that no normal employee of a national chain has ever been impacted by being told by a customer that they're taking their business elsewhere. If anything people should write letters to corporate, not let a low level employee with no interest in the company know.

I wish the pharmacy was still owned by the pharmacist

Hey now. Don't you dare put our oligarch's wealth in even the slightest bit of jeopardy.

There's a retail strategy of putting products at your fingertips in the checkout aisle in order to entice you to buy it. Candy right next to you, so you're munching on it when you leave the store. You feel good, they get money, no additional load on the staff.

This is, effectively, the opposite strategy. Make getting your hands on anything annoying and difficult, increase the number of floor clerks you need to constantly unlock the shelf, and generally make the retail experience slower and more unpleasant.