Shopping is broken: Americans emerging from the early days of the pandemic found

Americans emerging from the early days

Several years ago, Americans emerging from the early days of the pandemic found that aisles at some of the country's biggest retailers had begun to change. After a year of shoppers mainlining online deliveries and battling unpredictable product shortages, stores finally replenished their shelves, but with a catch: Many products were locked behind acrylic barriers. The plastic shields, once used sparingly to secure certain kinds of expensive or heavily regulated items such as cellphones or cigarettes, were now holding hostage run-of-the-mill toiletries and cleaning supplies. To negotiate their release, you'd need a key-wielding store employee. If no one was around and no one ever was you could press a call button and hope for the best.

The practice has since metastasized to so many kinds of products in so many more stores big-box discounters, beauty retailers, chain pharmacies that it's become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable product galleries armored in plexiglass. The whole thing has a whiff of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops. They, at least, have someone ready and waiting to take things out of lockup.

To understand how we got to this demoralizing retail reality, we have to go back to the Great Shoplifting Freak-Out of 2021. In the aftermath of pandemic upheaval and widespread protests following the murder of George Floyd by police, an unsettled country turned its attention to a handful of viral videos showing bands of thieves ransacking stores in violent smash-and-grab robberies and making off with huge quantities of everything from shampoo to luxury handbags.

According to retailers, these videos were evidence of a larger problem: More and more organized crime rings were swiping large quantities of desirable, easily resold goods from brick-and-mortar stores and listing them online. Some retailers, including Target Corp., have cited these losses as justification for the decision to close stores, often in dense cities or less wealthy neighborhoods. (Not all of these claims stand up to scrutiny Target, for example, said that it was closing its East Harlem store in Manhattan in part because of crime, but also plans to open a new store nearby, closer to major transit lines.)

These companies say the only way to stymie crime without closing stores is to harden their on-shelf defenses. Less obtrusive options, including increasing in-store surveillance and carrying fewer name-brand goods, haven't done enough to cut down on theft, they claim. Retailers are generally reticent to discuss these tactics in any detail, and when I tried to interview the biggest ones, they stuck to that vagueness: Walgreens didn't respond to a request for comment, and a Target spokesperson declined to respond to questions, instead emphasizing in-store safety and a positive customer experience in a statement. A spokesperson for CVS one of the retailers that uses hard plastic barriers most liberally would only describe putting products under lock and key as "a last resort."

In retailers' eyes it might be their best option, but it's one that appears to be backfiring. Neil Saunders, managing director of the retail practice at the firm Global Data, describes the locking up of merch as "a blunt instrument." Several years into this experiment, the instrument's outcomes are becoming clear: miserable workers, irritated customers, abandoned shopping carts and more reasons than ever to shop online. The modern American store is designed around self-service, which encourages customers to buy more. If you can't just grab most of the things you want, the brick-and-mortar retail system as we know it stops working.