In my neighborhood grocery store, when it gets busy some assistant store manager-type cruises the back of the long lines saying, “Would you like to use self checkout?” “Oh no,” I say warmly, helpfully. “I don’t work here. I’m a *customer.*” (Awkward confusion ensues.)
The problem, though, is that self-checkout often doesn’t work either! Have you ever experienced the irritating indignity of trying and failing to scan an item, only for the system to lock up and force you to wait for an (understandably) annoyed cashier to come unlock it, all while offering cheery assurances that “help is on the way!”
I say the same thing and enjoy the confusion. I'd rather spend the time waiting and watching people than the frustration of self checkout, where more than half the time something goes wrong and I'm trying to flag down the "help" that's supposedly "on the way". One time it was because I hadn't removed my purse from the grocery cart.
I got tired of having mountains of plastic grocery bags and every trip adding 8 more, so I invested in my own reusable bags (each holds the equivalent of 3-4 store bags).
Oh, man, the self-checkout stations HATE my bags! The overhead camera sees me pull "something" from the cart and move it to the bagging area without scanning and it freaks out. The store workers get it (this store has a great set of employees) and have seen my bags enough that they just come over and clear the alert, but I get flagged almost every trip.
And unfortunately, my schedule is such that I generally do my grocery shopping late at night, right before closing, and they have no normal checkout lines open; it's self-checkout or nothing.
Yes, because you are paying for someone else to push the cart around the store and select the items. Why don't you object to doing that? After all, you don't work there.
This is such a great piece — thank you for researching and writing it. I anecdotally have seen much of this in my own neighborhood, which is predominantly Black and Latino. The CVS three blocks from my house locked nearly the entire store behind plexiglass in 2023 or so, and people just stopped going there. Every time I went in (which was rare, because everything was locked up), there were only 1-2 other customers in the entire store. I suspected for a long time that CVS was trying to justify closing this store (and others in similar neighborhoods) via low performance that they manufactured themselves. Imagine my lack of surprise when it closed four months ago. (Whether because it was the ultimate goal or just the result of corporate incompetence, who can say?)
I live in a large city and the drug stores that are in wealthier neighborhoods or which are frequented by tourists have barely anything locked up, when I would be willing to bet they actually have more shoplifting just due to the sheer volume of customers. It says a lot about which stores these companies prioritize. I’ve been shocked at how much these companies have been shooting themselves in the foot with this strategy, and it’s good to see that my gut instincts on it are backed up by the data.
Such a good point, and something I was thinking about in earlier drafts. Not only are fewer items locked up in some wealthier neighborhoods, but there is more staff so it takes less time to get help for fewer items that are.
This is not the case in DC, unfortunately. Everything is locked up everywhere*, and we’re all hostage to the Assistance Needed buttons. The Georgetown Safeway (in a neighborhood internationally synonymous for effete out of touch elites) even makes you exit through bizarre gates that require a scanned receipt. The feeling is very much that of a human stockade.
CVS might as well have the courage of their convictions and employ TSA-style searches. The indignity for customers and employees is outrageous.
On another forum somewhere a commenter said that this is all part of CVS’ plan to wind down their brick and mortar retail altogether and just rely on mail-order pharmacy and their PBM income. Make it stop!
Its not lost on me that the majority of white men making these decisions are not likely the main person for their family who does the shopping. It's not going to feel like a problem if you don't have to deal with the shitty interface. I personally will not deal with that shit. I don't have the energy to spend 5-9 minutes standing in an isle hoping they have staff to support me unlock crap.
And another thing (lol)... Especially when I'm at the drug store, I need to read labels - what's in it, what dose, exp date etc. When there's 17 kinds of allergy medicine, you want to know what you're taking and what they've added for New! And Improved! One time I had to summon help, wait forever, and when they came and unlocked it, I read some stuff on the label and decided, "Nope," which of course brought on some eye-rolling and an annoyed sigh from the over-worked underpaid employee.
I blame Big Acrylic. I can't imagine how many tubes of incarcerated toothpaste it takes to offset the costs of the "protection." Somebody sold those retailers a load of guff, at a fine profit, I'm sure.
Feeling vindicated. I said from the get-go this was about not wanting to pay for employees. It’s obviously more than that, but it’s safe to say the gaslighting of America continues. Thanks for this illuminating piece!
Thank you for this piece. I’ve been enraged about this for years now. At first I used to park myself in front of the locked display and order the item online (and chat with the cashier or store manager about it openly and in a friendly way, because obviously we all hate this crap.)
Several years along, at our understaffed local CVS, I usually make someone unlock the case (if I have the time.) I don’t want the neighborhood to lose the store, because it’s a pharmacy in walking distance. But I’m not going to make it easy for them to keep reducing staff, either.
I look forward to the lawsuits. I believe Jewel (grocery store chain) has been sued for their smartphone-only loyalty app. CVS is going to become a store where only smartphone users willing to join the loyalty program AND install the app will be able to buy certain products.
If we let them get away with it. I want to start a protest campaign in stores that install the loyalty-unlock cases. If we all commit to asking for help to unlock cases (then take your time looking, but don’t buy anything), we can kill this idea.
great piece. I’ll add that, as time goes on, there seems to be less and less rhyme & reason behind what is locked up and what is not—more like, 80% of the shelves have this infrastructure, and the stores have to put their inventory somewhere, so behind the plexiglass this half of the vitamin inventory goes.
I’m always amused/angered when I go to the supermarket and see a sea of beer and wine on open shelves, while a few dozen cans of baby formula are locked up. Instead of seeing shoplifting of formula as an indictment of our society’s policies and choices WRT: poor people who can’t afford formula for their very young children (and perhaps thinking, “Maybe we should subsidize this product”), we choose to make it even harder for people to feed their children. Relentless capitalism for individuals and unreasonable socialism for corporations and the Epstein class can’t fall soon enough!
Some of this really was, and still would be if so many of these stores hadn't closed, happening though. I never saw any of this on social media, because before substack a year ago I never had any. I see it myself everyday.I work every day in downtown Portland OR and I have seen for many years now the crazy fentanyl junkies taking what they want from the shelves of CVS and Rite Aid and Target (all three have since closed) this isn't exaggeration or hyperbole. That being said Im not some tough on crime dimwit either. As much as some of the particularly gross or antisocial street zombies piss me off I know they are the most disenfranchised and powerless people in the country. So I'm not going to blame them for some corporations woes. It doesn't mean they're not actually ripping shit off constantly though. The organized crime theft rings do seem more far-fetched to me though. Though I have also seen with my own eyes non-homeless, non crazy looking people taking valuable items out of stores brazenly and unchallenged. Because security guards are apparently just for show. The companies must not allow them to physically , or apparently even verbally, stop someone from commission of a crime. I assume this is because of liability and the sue happy nature of our ridiculous country. And DA offices will not prosecute for theft under a $1000 anyways.
I know the real problem with these companies is their greed, their transition into private equity owned slop, and eventual demise. However, when liberals and progressives tell regular working people over and over again that we're not actually seeing what we're seeing, that the stats don't back it up, etc it feels insulting. It reminds me of Hilary’s (or was it Kamala ?) “America’s already great” shit that her team thought was a good message to angry would be trump voters.
I want a society that that lifts working people up, puts homeless addicts into treatment with the goal of having decent lives, even against their own wishes. And most importantly dismantling all of the structures that profit off human misery , suffering, life, death. all of it. We should start by nationalizing and liquidating the defense industry.
Yeah there's clearly shoplifting, and even if the national averages are relatively flat, that doesn't mean there can't be spikes in certain stores or areas. But companies factor theft into their margins, and when they decide to reduce staff they know that will correspond to increased theft. So to me what's interesting is how something in our culture in 2020 and beyond led them to abandon that kind of rational analysis and reach for a solution that truly killed their bottom line
You assume they care about a bottom line. Late capitalism allows the extraction of value from intentional failure as much as it does good performance because it is now essentially post modernist subjectivist and not modernist based on actual objective material conditions and their metrics.
End stage late stage capitalism creates the totality of a system that ahnihilates human beings by disinvesting in social support structures via the political and at the same time disinvests itself from objective material metrics like profitability by gutting and destroying perfectly functioning companies to extract their value to fewer and fewer of the investor class.
The homeless problem in Portland is just another symptom as is the choices to create barriers to traditional material condition based profitability. Profitability doesn't matter anymore to the investor class in meaningful terms.
Neoliberal Late capitalism as it exists now isn't much different today from someone who works in public policy creating specific policy taking that information to use to "invest" in the emergent predictive markets.
Only it's worse because that policy at least has some material reality and consequence attached to it typically.
Much of what happens in end stage late capitalism now is a post modernist circle jerk of manifested subjectivist "self truths" that reinforce one another to create an alternate reality devoid of actual requiring materially based metrics like actual profit.
Just look at AI valuations. As more and more wealth is concentrated to fewer and fewer material reality and conditions cease to be necessary at all.
It's all interelated. It's all a feature and a not bug of neoliberal end stage late capitalism.
Ironically this whole situation makes going to the store in the US a lot closer to going to the store in Cuba, where toiletries are locked up behind a counter and customers have to ask employees to get them what they need. They also have security guards who check your bags on the way out - which might be the next indignity we’re subjected to.
And they think we’re gonna leave Amazon for this?!!
I can see how this was a tough piece to compose, comrade. The whole idea of shopping seems as natural as breathing but it's a dynamic of capitalism. "Store" still means items in reserve. Yet the iconic "frontier" general store began as a place where nearly all goods for sale were behind a counter, customers requested items and employees retrieved them. Shoplifting has always been a thing since the first open-air markets of ancient civilizations and empires. Seems like all that wealth, mostly derived from alienated labour, sits before us, and the poorest and most sociopathic shoppers might look at that wealth differently from people who fear the law or have the means to comply with it. And yet the greediest have always been able to steal from most of us all of the time.
What's wild is that the switch from the "General Store" model to the supermarket model was driven by a desire to lower labor costs, i.e. make the customers fetch their own items from the shelves rather than paying an employee to do it. But now they're back to needing to pay an employee to go unlock stuff for customers.
Brilliant - among your very best, Danny! Why can I not help comparing the shoplifting panic among corporate elites to the Antifa one among governing (billionaire friendly) elites? Similar methods, similar aims, similar pathology.
I live in SF. My local Safeway is the one at King and 4th Street, opposite Oracle Park. Recently, they went from having a few self-checkouts and several manned checkstands, to a total re-configuration of a single line of customers waiting for multiple check outs, as they do in Trader Joe's, for example. The problem is, the lines are horrifically long because they usually only have two or three people manning the check outs. So not only are they locking things up, but they are reducing their staff making the shopping experience awful. I mean, if you're going to do a Trader Joe's-style configuration, then you need to have 8 or 10 people manning the registers to keep people moving. I asked one of the checker why they don't have more people on the registers and they said Safeway is reducing their hours. ??? So, let me get this straight: people are abandoning your store because the shopping experience is terrible, so the answer is to keep making it worse? I swore to my husband that I'm never shopping there again, even if I have to drive a couple of miles to a different supermarket. Insanity. Truly.
It is, mathematically speaking, a better way. One line for several checkouts has been proven to improve average service times. Banks have been doing this for years - Fry's Electronics did too, before they went 'pop'.
That said, the time you spent in line is not something that enters into the bean-counters' spreadsheets. To them, it's not a cost. To us, however, it is, and we can choose to not shop there anymore - something else that the MBAs can't calculate until it's too late for the whole store.
Thusly the crack about how your time in line counts as exactly zero to their spreadsheets. There isn't even a cell in their databases to record something that they have perfectly externalized.
I’d love to see how TJs compares to others in grocery when it comes to loss. Why? They have exactly what is mentioned in the piece as missing in so many stores - people working. Checklane after checklane is open and most have two employees per checklane!
My local Food Lion has self checkout, which I use unless a cashiers' line is shorter (it rarely is). Food Lion keeps an associate at self checkout to help. So there's one associate for 4 checkout stations. The workers are nice, but I think that's because they like working there, which means they're paid fairly.
My best checkout experience, though, is Sam's Club. I use their Scan and Go app and scan my stuff as I load it into the cart. At the exit, they used to have an associate (or occasionally, two associates) who counted the items in your cart to make sure that you scanned everything (yes, it would be easy to fool). Now they have a station with cameras just before the exit that reviews your cart, and if the count matches your cart, they just wave you through.
I find the best checkout experience is at Sam's Club's main competitor - Costco. Even at self checkout there's always at least one employee there to help. But I rarely use their self checkout because, even though it's always busy and everyone has at least one full cart, they keep those lines moving with efficiency. And the folks at my local Costco are always quite friendly to boot.
To me the absurdity of the great retail item imprisonment was laid bare by the giant plexiglass cage placed around the small bottle of laxative tablets we were buying at walmart that one time.
In my neighborhood grocery store, when it gets busy some assistant store manager-type cruises the back of the long lines saying, “Would you like to use self checkout?” “Oh no,” I say warmly, helpfully. “I don’t work here. I’m a *customer.*” (Awkward confusion ensues.)
lol I love self-checkout because I'm an alienated New Yorker
I’m from Jersey and I worked as a grocery store cashier in high school. I don’t have time, let’s do self checkout so I can sail right through.
But I totally get that some people don’t have my particular neuroses!
The problem, though, is that self-checkout often doesn’t work either! Have you ever experienced the irritating indignity of trying and failing to scan an item, only for the system to lock up and force you to wait for an (understandably) annoyed cashier to come unlock it, all while offering cheery assurances that “help is on the way!”
I say the same thing and enjoy the confusion. I'd rather spend the time waiting and watching people than the frustration of self checkout, where more than half the time something goes wrong and I'm trying to flag down the "help" that's supposedly "on the way". One time it was because I hadn't removed my purse from the grocery cart.
I got tired of having mountains of plastic grocery bags and every trip adding 8 more, so I invested in my own reusable bags (each holds the equivalent of 3-4 store bags).
Oh, man, the self-checkout stations HATE my bags! The overhead camera sees me pull "something" from the cart and move it to the bagging area without scanning and it freaks out. The store workers get it (this store has a great set of employees) and have seen my bags enough that they just come over and clear the alert, but I get flagged almost every trip.
And unfortunately, my schedule is such that I generally do my grocery shopping late at night, right before closing, and they have no normal checkout lines open; it's self-checkout or nothing.
It’s easier to get a….ummm….discount at self checkout. Most things end up being buy 3 get one free, for example. Odd.
I'm surprised that you don't have all of your groceries delivered.
It’s 15-20% more to have groceries delivered
Yes, because you are paying for someone else to push the cart around the store and select the items. Why don't you object to doing that? After all, you don't work there.
This is such a great piece — thank you for researching and writing it. I anecdotally have seen much of this in my own neighborhood, which is predominantly Black and Latino. The CVS three blocks from my house locked nearly the entire store behind plexiglass in 2023 or so, and people just stopped going there. Every time I went in (which was rare, because everything was locked up), there were only 1-2 other customers in the entire store. I suspected for a long time that CVS was trying to justify closing this store (and others in similar neighborhoods) via low performance that they manufactured themselves. Imagine my lack of surprise when it closed four months ago. (Whether because it was the ultimate goal or just the result of corporate incompetence, who can say?)
I live in a large city and the drug stores that are in wealthier neighborhoods or which are frequented by tourists have barely anything locked up, when I would be willing to bet they actually have more shoplifting just due to the sheer volume of customers. It says a lot about which stores these companies prioritize. I’ve been shocked at how much these companies have been shooting themselves in the foot with this strategy, and it’s good to see that my gut instincts on it are backed up by the data.
Such a good point, and something I was thinking about in earlier drafts. Not only are fewer items locked up in some wealthier neighborhoods, but there is more staff so it takes less time to get help for fewer items that are.
This is not the case in DC, unfortunately. Everything is locked up everywhere*, and we’re all hostage to the Assistance Needed buttons. The Georgetown Safeway (in a neighborhood internationally synonymous for effete out of touch elites) even makes you exit through bizarre gates that require a scanned receipt. The feeling is very much that of a human stockade.
CVS might as well have the courage of their convictions and employ TSA-style searches. The indignity for customers and employees is outrageous.
On another forum somewhere a commenter said that this is all part of CVS’ plan to wind down their brick and mortar retail altogether and just rely on mail-order pharmacy and their PBM income. Make it stop!
*Not that it should be anywhere!
“Human stockade” indeed
Its not lost on me that the majority of white men making these decisions are not likely the main person for their family who does the shopping. It's not going to feel like a problem if you don't have to deal with the shitty interface. I personally will not deal with that shit. I don't have the energy to spend 5-9 minutes standing in an isle hoping they have staff to support me unlock crap.
And another thing (lol)... Especially when I'm at the drug store, I need to read labels - what's in it, what dose, exp date etc. When there's 17 kinds of allergy medicine, you want to know what you're taking and what they've added for New! And Improved! One time I had to summon help, wait forever, and when they came and unlocked it, I read some stuff on the label and decided, "Nope," which of course brought on some eye-rolling and an annoyed sigh from the over-worked underpaid employee.
Totally! I had this in mind during an earlier draft and got away from it, but this is more than an inconvenience
I blame Big Acrylic. I can't imagine how many tubes of incarcerated toothpaste it takes to offset the costs of the "protection." Somebody sold those retailers a load of guff, at a fine profit, I'm sure.
Feeling vindicated. I said from the get-go this was about not wanting to pay for employees. It’s obviously more than that, but it’s safe to say the gaslighting of America continues. Thanks for this illuminating piece!
It's wild how many things are motivated by not wanting to pay workers
Thank you for this piece. I’ve been enraged about this for years now. At first I used to park myself in front of the locked display and order the item online (and chat with the cashier or store manager about it openly and in a friendly way, because obviously we all hate this crap.)
Several years along, at our understaffed local CVS, I usually make someone unlock the case (if I have the time.) I don’t want the neighborhood to lose the store, because it’s a pharmacy in walking distance. But I’m not going to make it easy for them to keep reducing staff, either.
I look forward to the lawsuits. I believe Jewel (grocery store chain) has been sued for their smartphone-only loyalty app. CVS is going to become a store where only smartphone users willing to join the loyalty program AND install the app will be able to buy certain products.
If we let them get away with it. I want to start a protest campaign in stores that install the loyalty-unlock cases. If we all commit to asking for help to unlock cases (then take your time looking, but don’t buy anything), we can kill this idea.
great piece. I’ll add that, as time goes on, there seems to be less and less rhyme & reason behind what is locked up and what is not—more like, 80% of the shelves have this infrastructure, and the stores have to put their inventory somewhere, so behind the plexiglass this half of the vitamin inventory goes.
I’m always amused/angered when I go to the supermarket and see a sea of beer and wine on open shelves, while a few dozen cans of baby formula are locked up. Instead of seeing shoplifting of formula as an indictment of our society’s policies and choices WRT: poor people who can’t afford formula for their very young children (and perhaps thinking, “Maybe we should subsidize this product”), we choose to make it even harder for people to feed their children. Relentless capitalism for individuals and unreasonable socialism for corporations and the Epstein class can’t fall soon enough!
Some of this really was, and still would be if so many of these stores hadn't closed, happening though. I never saw any of this on social media, because before substack a year ago I never had any. I see it myself everyday.I work every day in downtown Portland OR and I have seen for many years now the crazy fentanyl junkies taking what they want from the shelves of CVS and Rite Aid and Target (all three have since closed) this isn't exaggeration or hyperbole. That being said Im not some tough on crime dimwit either. As much as some of the particularly gross or antisocial street zombies piss me off I know they are the most disenfranchised and powerless people in the country. So I'm not going to blame them for some corporations woes. It doesn't mean they're not actually ripping shit off constantly though. The organized crime theft rings do seem more far-fetched to me though. Though I have also seen with my own eyes non-homeless, non crazy looking people taking valuable items out of stores brazenly and unchallenged. Because security guards are apparently just for show. The companies must not allow them to physically , or apparently even verbally, stop someone from commission of a crime. I assume this is because of liability and the sue happy nature of our ridiculous country. And DA offices will not prosecute for theft under a $1000 anyways.
I know the real problem with these companies is their greed, their transition into private equity owned slop, and eventual demise. However, when liberals and progressives tell regular working people over and over again that we're not actually seeing what we're seeing, that the stats don't back it up, etc it feels insulting. It reminds me of Hilary’s (or was it Kamala ?) “America’s already great” shit that her team thought was a good message to angry would be trump voters.
I want a society that that lifts working people up, puts homeless addicts into treatment with the goal of having decent lives, even against their own wishes. And most importantly dismantling all of the structures that profit off human misery , suffering, life, death. all of it. We should start by nationalizing and liquidating the defense industry.
Yeah there's clearly shoplifting, and even if the national averages are relatively flat, that doesn't mean there can't be spikes in certain stores or areas. But companies factor theft into their margins, and when they decide to reduce staff they know that will correspond to increased theft. So to me what's interesting is how something in our culture in 2020 and beyond led them to abandon that kind of rational analysis and reach for a solution that truly killed their bottom line
You assume they care about a bottom line. Late capitalism allows the extraction of value from intentional failure as much as it does good performance because it is now essentially post modernist subjectivist and not modernist based on actual objective material conditions and their metrics.
End stage late stage capitalism creates the totality of a system that ahnihilates human beings by disinvesting in social support structures via the political and at the same time disinvests itself from objective material metrics like profitability by gutting and destroying perfectly functioning companies to extract their value to fewer and fewer of the investor class.
The homeless problem in Portland is just another symptom as is the choices to create barriers to traditional material condition based profitability. Profitability doesn't matter anymore to the investor class in meaningful terms.
Neoliberal Late capitalism as it exists now isn't much different today from someone who works in public policy creating specific policy taking that information to use to "invest" in the emergent predictive markets.
Only it's worse because that policy at least has some material reality and consequence attached to it typically.
Much of what happens in end stage late capitalism now is a post modernist circle jerk of manifested subjectivist "self truths" that reinforce one another to create an alternate reality devoid of actual requiring materially based metrics like actual profit.
Just look at AI valuations. As more and more wealth is concentrated to fewer and fewer material reality and conditions cease to be necessary at all.
It's all interelated. It's all a feature and a not bug of neoliberal end stage late capitalism.
This was all inevitable.
Ironically this whole situation makes going to the store in the US a lot closer to going to the store in Cuba, where toiletries are locked up behind a counter and customers have to ask employees to get them what they need. They also have security guards who check your bags on the way out - which might be the next indignity we’re subjected to.
And they think we’re gonna leave Amazon for this?!!
I can see how this was a tough piece to compose, comrade. The whole idea of shopping seems as natural as breathing but it's a dynamic of capitalism. "Store" still means items in reserve. Yet the iconic "frontier" general store began as a place where nearly all goods for sale were behind a counter, customers requested items and employees retrieved them. Shoplifting has always been a thing since the first open-air markets of ancient civilizations and empires. Seems like all that wealth, mostly derived from alienated labour, sits before us, and the poorest and most sociopathic shoppers might look at that wealth differently from people who fear the law or have the means to comply with it. And yet the greediest have always been able to steal from most of us all of the time.
What's wild is that the switch from the "General Store" model to the supermarket model was driven by a desire to lower labor costs, i.e. make the customers fetch their own items from the shelves rather than paying an employee to do it. But now they're back to needing to pay an employee to go unlock stuff for customers.
Brilliant - among your very best, Danny! Why can I not help comparing the shoplifting panic among corporate elites to the Antifa one among governing (billionaire friendly) elites? Similar methods, similar aims, similar pathology.
I live in SF. My local Safeway is the one at King and 4th Street, opposite Oracle Park. Recently, they went from having a few self-checkouts and several manned checkstands, to a total re-configuration of a single line of customers waiting for multiple check outs, as they do in Trader Joe's, for example. The problem is, the lines are horrifically long because they usually only have two or three people manning the check outs. So not only are they locking things up, but they are reducing their staff making the shopping experience awful. I mean, if you're going to do a Trader Joe's-style configuration, then you need to have 8 or 10 people manning the registers to keep people moving. I asked one of the checker why they don't have more people on the registers and they said Safeway is reducing their hours. ??? So, let me get this straight: people are abandoning your store because the shopping experience is terrible, so the answer is to keep making it worse? I swore to my husband that I'm never shopping there again, even if I have to drive a couple of miles to a different supermarket. Insanity. Truly.
It is, mathematically speaking, a better way. One line for several checkouts has been proven to improve average service times. Banks have been doing this for years - Fry's Electronics did too, before they went 'pop'.
That said, the time you spent in line is not something that enters into the bean-counters' spreadsheets. To them, it's not a cost. To us, however, it is, and we can choose to not shop there anymore - something else that the MBAs can't calculate until it's too late for the whole store.
Yes, it works when you have enough people manning the registers, which TJ's always does. But when you only have two or three, the system falls apart.
Thusly the crack about how your time in line counts as exactly zero to their spreadsheets. There isn't even a cell in their databases to record something that they have perfectly externalized.
I’d love to see how TJs compares to others in grocery when it comes to loss. Why? They have exactly what is mentioned in the piece as missing in so many stores - people working. Checklane after checklane is open and most have two employees per checklane!
First, thanks for a great article.
My local Food Lion has self checkout, which I use unless a cashiers' line is shorter (it rarely is). Food Lion keeps an associate at self checkout to help. So there's one associate for 4 checkout stations. The workers are nice, but I think that's because they like working there, which means they're paid fairly.
My best checkout experience, though, is Sam's Club. I use their Scan and Go app and scan my stuff as I load it into the cart. At the exit, they used to have an associate (or occasionally, two associates) who counted the items in your cart to make sure that you scanned everything (yes, it would be easy to fool). Now they have a station with cameras just before the exit that reviews your cart, and if the count matches your cart, they just wave you through.
I find the best checkout experience is at Sam's Club's main competitor - Costco. Even at self checkout there's always at least one employee there to help. But I rarely use their self checkout because, even though it's always busy and everyone has at least one full cart, they keep those lines moving with efficiency. And the folks at my local Costco are always quite friendly to boot.
To me the absurdity of the great retail item imprisonment was laid bare by the giant plexiglass cage placed around the small bottle of laxative tablets we were buying at walmart that one time.