Product locks flood local stores

At one area CVS, it’s not difficult to run in and grab a Colgate Optic White toothpaste.

But if you want a two-pack of the same product, it gets a little trickier.

Like many products at retail stores, the $8 toothpaste pack has migrated behind a locked case.

The reason, one retail security supplier said, “a pandemic of theft.” The uptick in locked cases, Indyme Solutions CEO Joe Budano said, is just retailers’ attempt “stem the tide.”

“Wet shave products, baby formula, Tide detergent, all types of detergent, skin care products — those are some of the high lift items, and the reason that is, is because they’re small, and they’re valuable,” said Cory Lowe, a senior researcher at the Loss Prevention Research Council.

The products can be easily lifted in high quantities, Lowe said, and easily resold at increasingly-accessible internet outlets at “essentially infinite profit margins.”

With the growth in online shopping and particular circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic, the instances of this kind of “organized retail crime,” which can be perpetrated systematically by individuals or large retail gangs, shot up dramatically, especially around urban areas.

After 2020, the National Retail Federation found that 57% of retail organizations reported the pandemic increased the risk of organized retail crime. One Walgreens representative noted it has become “one of the top challenges facing the industry today.”

“A lot of retailers have been making big investments, in terms of thousands of cases throughout the organization,” said Lowe. “And the reason is because retail theft is something that they otherwise can’t do a lot about.”

Anti-theft tags, monitoring devices or other measures can only do so much when people are increasingly motivated and organized, Lowe said. And retailers often don’t want to force employees to confront potentially armed thieves and risk their safety.

But the locked cases also represent a trade-off for retailers. Research and surveys have found, Lowe said, often customers are put off by the wait time of finding a store employee, or embarrassed to ask for items like reproductive health products, or just unhappy with being treated like a thief. All of which can hurt sales.

“But they use the strategy, because if they didn’t, in many cases they just wouldn’t have products on the shelves for the community,” Lowe said.

Meaning, for the foreseeable future, it may take a key to get to the toothpaste.