Locked display cases, the theft-prevention measure that makes shopping less grab-and-go and more wait-and-see, aim to prevent shoplifting, but a new survey suggests that particular solution might be worse than the problem.
Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case, according to a reader survey from Consumer World, a consumer advocacy website. For 55% of respondents, it’s a lost sale, because when a product is locked up, they try to buy it elsewhere. The remaining 13% try to find an alternative product in the same store that is not locked up.
The online survey of 1,124 readers was conducted from September 2 through September 9.
Locked stock and barrel: Edgar Dworsky, a consumer advocate who publishes Consumer World, knows how he would have filled out his survey.
“If I encounter a locked case, I’m not going to start looking for a store clerk going up and down every aisle or pressing the button and waiting for someone to come over,” Dworsky told Retail Brew. “But the fact that it was over 50% of people that felt the way I did? I was really surprised.”
Dworsky acknowledged that the results might be skewing high because it was an opt-in survey that readers took rather than a random one, and said his audience tends to be “interested in consumer matters,” which may mean they have a lower threshold for consumer inconvenience.
National chains including Target have put much of their inventory behind glass in recent years as a response to what they call organized retail crime, shoplifting rings that have been captured in viral videos. But some have said the scope of the problem has been overstated.
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A September 13 CNN article noted that retail executives seem to be sounding the alarm less about theft, which they speak about under the rubric of “shrink.” Mentions of “shrink” on earnings calls for the first two quarters of 2024 were down 20% compared to the same period a year ago according to a FactSet analysis cited by CNN.
“A year ago, America’s stores declared a shoplifting epidemic,” stated the CNN article. “This year, retailers are telling a very different story—or no story at all. It’s as if the shoplifting crisis suddenly vanished.”
Brick and mortified: Dworsky said he is “not a loss-prevention expert” and doesn’t claim to have a solution for the ubiquity of locked cases.
“This is a no-win situation,” he said. “If you leave all the stuff there, from what I hear, they’re being robbed blind by shoplifters; if you lock it up, you’re annoying customers and losing sales. Either way, the retailer loses.”
“It’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable
product galleries armored in plexiglass,” Amanda Mull wrote about locked cases in Bloomberg in August. “The whole thing has a whiff of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops.”
The challenge could be an existential one for stores.
“If stores lock up too much stuff, they cease to be stores—they become giant vending machines with no place to insert your money,” Mull wrote. “For a lot of shoppers, those locked shelves become another reason to avoid in-person shopping and hand their business over to Amazon.”