Why Joel Bines says locked display cases are ‘the single most customer unfriendly’ retail strategy

You could say that Joel Bines wrote the book on customer-centric retail approaches, and not just because he’s been a retail consultant for more than two decades, primarily as a managing director at AlixPartners before striking out on his own to form Spruce Advisory in 2023. You also could say it because Bines did write a book on the subject: The Metail Economy: 6 Strategies for Transforming Your Business to Thrive in the Me-Centric Consumer Revolution.

When the book was published in 2022, Bines told Retail Brew that although retailers have always said they put customers first, he had observed that “rarely was the customer even part of the vast majority of the dialogue in boardrooms.”

The book argues that in today’s consumer-centric “metail” paradigm, retail executives should take a lesson from Costco, which makes the hoses on its gas pumps extra long to reach the gas tank even if shoppers pulled in on the wrong side. It’s a convenience apt to delight customers, Bines told us at the time, but it’s also a way to sell more gas, because, “if you come at it from a logistics perspective, you get massively more throughput through the gas lines than you would if you had to have cars backing up and moving around to get on the other side.”

We’ve been covering the growing ubiquity of locked display cases, which retailers including Target and CVS have installed to curb what they claim is a growing problem of shoplifting rings contributing to stores’ overall merchandise losses (aka “shrink”), so we wondered if Bines had any thoughts about the practice.

He had thoughts.

Shrink outside the box: “Is it the right thing for the customer to lock up product?” Bines asked Retail Brew. “One hundred percent no. There’s not a CEO or a retail leader in the world that would say that is customer-friendly.”

One mystery surrounding locked-display cases is how that solution can be better than the problem it ostensibly solves:

• When they find that what they’re shopping for is locked up, fewer than one in three shoppers (32%) bother to summon an employee to unlock the case, with 55% of them not buying an alternative in the store but rather shopping elsewhere, according to a reader survey from Consumer World.
• Results from a Retail Brew reader poll were even more stark, with fewer than one in five shoppers (19%) saying they'd summon an employee if something they wanted to buy was locked up; 46.4% said in that circumstance they’d purchase the item online instead, and only 8.5% said they’d buy something similar in the store that wasn’t locked up.

Retailers can track shrink, but often not whether the products even made it to shelves but rather were stolen in warehouses, en route to stores, or from stores’ back rooms. However, thanks to viral videos of bands of shoplifters sweeping products off shelves, Bines said an inordinate amount has been attributed to shoplifting.

“Yes, organized theft exists, but it’s much easier to attack a train…than it is to run into 15 CVS’s and grab a bunch of Old Spice,” Bines said.

But even when stores do have high levels of shoplifting, Bines said flummoxing shoppers with locked cases is not the solution.

“We have got to make sure everything we do starts and ends with, ‘What does our consumer want, and how do we give it to them?’ And then we figure out how to make money,” he said.

New kids on the lock: As for how to address shoplifting in a way that doesn’t also create friction for those without sticky fingers, Bines said one promising solution is letting consumers unlock the cases themselves through store apps on their phones, as CVS is doing in a pilot program.

Another option for shoplifting-prone stores, he said, is putting less stock on shelves but restocking more frequently.

“So that if somebody does hit you, they don’t hit you for 24 Mach3 razors, they hit you for two Mach3 razors,” he said. “Because how often does somebody walk into a store and need to buy more than two Mach3 razors at a time?”

His preferred solution: Get rid of the locked cases and hire more associates at those stores, and have those associates circulating as floaters and stockers. Bines wouldn’t task those employees with fighting shoplifting, but just having them visible would act as a “prophylactic” against shoplifting, he said.

Bines does not recommend hiring security guards to give shoppers the hairy eyeball, but rather “customer service professionals” to elevate shopping, he said.

“Put more labor in the stores and give your customer a better experience,” Bines said. “And if you give your customer a better experience, all things being equal, they’ll shop with you more and they’ll tell their friends and that store will do better.”