Walgreens CEO describes drawback of anti-shoplifting strategy: ‘When you lock things up…you don’t sell as many of them’
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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This is what happens when 100% of shoppers are treated like the 1-4% who steal.
Not to mention that employees are responsible for some of the theft too
In general, society spends an awful lot of extra effort just because a few percent might abuse it. Sometimes, it's completely hypothetical abuse.
Healthcare? Someone might overuse it, and therefore everyone has to pay out the nose.
Unions? They let some people slack off at work.
Child tax credits? Some parents might use it to buy drugs (this was an actual argument from Joe Manchin, and it's completely made up).
Reduce the military? What if China invades the US?
Theft is a huge problem in some locations. Some people have no problem filling up a cart with whatever they need and walking out the door. Employees don’t get paid enough to get involved. Cops only show up afterwards. Even if they catch the culprit, there arent any repercussions.
And yet theft rates are the same as they have pretty much always been.
They've gone up. And it's easy to see why. We have a minimum wage that hasn't been increased in decades and the current model of corporate efficiency is understaffing and union busting.
A huge portion of the population is cash strapped with the only job opportunities being poverty wages.
Desperate people commit crimes.
They have not actually. They have gone up in a few places but are roughly the same overall.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth-vs-reality-trends-retail-theft
https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/18/business/retail-shoplifting-shrink-walgreens/index.html
With the increase in prices for everything from food to housing, and the greed of large corps being completely ignored by governments, I honestly don't gaf about shoplifting food or clothing. If I see it happening I walk away.
Are you sure you saw anything? I certainly didn't. Especially at large corporate retail stores.
True. I may have just been remembering back to when I was a kid living on the streets and stealing food to survive.
- They are most likely insured for that.
- Police are ineffective at anything else than filling up prisons with minorities? Say it ain't so!
- People are desperate, and corps have knocked the social contract over. This is how that looks like, at the mildest.
They are insured. It's often the insurance company who is insisting on these measures. Sometimes, it doesn't even matter if they are effective or not; the insurance company simply demands that you have them.
Sucks for Walgreens then.