this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Has absolutely nothing to do with prices being too high
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.
Both are correct. It's too expensive AND it doesn't help sales. There are no reps around to unlock the doors, why would you wait to buy?
Target near me has all the booze locked up. They have a button you can press to get an employee to open the cases for you to buy something. I waited 10 minutes for someone to come and open up the case to buy a bottle of Campari. Nobody ever showed up. I wrote Target to tell them I'll be looking elsewhere from now on for any item they keep in a case.
10 minutes for a bottle of alcohol? That's bullshit. I've never seen a place where the liquor is locked up near me.
Yup. It’s TOTAL bullshit. I felt like I was in some place like Pakistan where they keep the booze locked up and you have to tell them how many Units you require and then they go and get it for you. But worse, because they never fucking get it for you at lockup Target.
I wonder if anyone considered installing a camera and a remote-triggered lock so a cashier, manager, or security person could just buzz someone in. All that crap is SUPER cheap now.
Or machine vision to track item pickups and follow the person around the store and out. You may need a cover over the items to have them pause to lift a plastic cover to give the system enough to confidently note that person X has collected item Y and placed it in cart/pocket/prison pocket.
Nearfield (NFC) was supposed to do this. I was supposed to be able to fill a cart and just push it out the store and be charged.
Yeah I remember an at in the 90s of rolling a shopping cart without scanning and here we are 30 years on... Still scanning....
Well, it's not NFC but Amazon has some convenience stores that can do it, I think there's a limit on the number of items though.
I can just imagine a shopping cart full of NFC transceivers screaming out there serial numbers simultaneously.
I've seen convenience stores that have a buzzer that turns on (very, VERY annoying buzzer) whenever someone opens up the liquor fridge in their store. This signals that someone is picking up some beer. It cannot be avoided. You want to be quick to get what you want and not have your ears buzzed off, but shoplifting alcohol is really hard that way. You can get it quick anyway.
I've seen that before, but it was a LONG time ago. Very effective for small stores.