Walgreens CEO describes drawback of anti-shoplifting strategy: ‘When you lock things up…you don’t sell as many of them’
Walgreens' CEO talked about the flip side of investing in increased security on a recent earnings call.
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It's not even that, it's their ultra short staffing that drives people away. I'm not going to go hunt for an employee and wait another twn minutes for someone with a key to open it up.
Home Depot does that and I get tired of waiting and order it from somewhere else.
Exactly! I’ve zero issues with this type of loss prevention. I have 10,000 issues having to find the call button, pressing it and then waiting upwards of TWENTY MINUTES for the Key Master to show up.
I once did that at Meijer for a switch pro controller, waited 30 minutes only for the person, who was supposed to have the key, just come over and rip the cardboard to get it off the locked hook. We only stayed because we had a Meijer gift card. Insane how long this kind of thing takes.
I don't understand why they don't just use a pickup ticket system. Costco does it for some smaller high end electronic products now. Hell, Toys R US did it decades ago with all of their video games and consoles. You just take the paper ticket to the cashier to pay and then the receipt to a pickup window where ALL of those products are kept.
Instead they choose the objectively worst option, extra hardware spread randomly around the store for each product, and spreading already shaky customer service even more thin with large waiting times for a manager with the keys to arrive.
Anyone else remember Service Merchandise? The whole store was just one display model of each thing. You got a ticket and waited for the item to come up a conveyor. I thought it was a great approach
I've had this problem at Microcenter and Best Buy too. All the salespeople have a key but there are only two and they're both tied up helping some grandma who doesn't know what she wants. After waiting over 20 minutes, I'm like I just need to get this one thing out of the cabinet.
I know you can order ahead and pick up but I like to sometimes pay fully or partially in cash so I get less grief about expensive purchases from my spouse. According to my credit card charge, when I bought my 4070ti the day they came out, it was only $380.
You are using Best Buy to facilitate spousal fraud for gaming purposes!
I like the cut of your jib.
The extra cash was from side hustle money and she never cares where I spend that anyway. But yeah. I never said that it only cost $380, and I never said that it didn't.
The CVS nearest me announces "cashier needed at [item]" over the intercom on loop until they show up when you hit the call button. In related news, I've now discovered the most awkward way possible to buy condoms.
Vinz Clortho?
The difference between Home Depot and Menard's in terms of finding an employee is amazing. I can find an employee in Menard's within a couple of minutes wherever I am in the store. Good luck ever finding a Home Depot employee, and if you do, good luck getting anything useful from them.
I worked at a store similar to Home Depot in college and let me tell you, they don't prepare you at all for the kind of questions people have. If they cared at all about investing in the customer experience (which they don't) they'd hire some retired handymen or something. I seriously did everything I could to limit my voyages from the checkout counter to the employee area because there was a 90% chance I'd disappoint someone on the way.
There's a bit in Neal Stephenson's early novel, Zodiac, that has always stuck with me. At a hardware store, everything has a specific purpose. The young guys working at the store can point you to that purpose. What you want is to find the old guy, who knows that everything there has a million alternative purposes.
What, giving you a pamphlet and showing you a video wasn't enough to make you a hardware expert? (Menial jobs for massive corporations suck so much.)
Yeah it's awful. I feel bad for those people when I go in there now. Sure they could take it upon themselves to learn everything but let's be honest, for the amount they get paid it's only worth doing the bare minimum to not get fired.
They can't hire old handymen when they pay just a few cents over minimum wage.
