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It’s no secret that consumers are not exactly enthralled by the locked display shelves they’re increasingly encountering in stores. A Consumer World reader poll found 2 out of 3 shoppers did not bother to summon an associate when an item they were shopping for was locked up; a Retail Brew reader poll found even more, 4 out of 5, decide not to have a product they’re shopping for unlocked.
What’s been a mystery, however, is how long shoppers typically wait for products to be unlocked, or how common the practice of locking up products has become.
Mystery solved: Shoppers wait an average of 7.7 minutes for under-key items to be unlocked, according to data from RDSolutions, the 35-year-old data and analytics firm formerly known as RetailData. The data, which had never been published before being provided to Retail Brew, was conducted on the week that began in September 30 in 626 drug, grocery, and mass-market retailers in the US and Canada.
The longest wait for items to be unlocked was at mass-retailers, where the average wait was 8.6 minutes, followed by grocery stores (7.5 minutes) and drug stores (6.9 minutes). The longest wait was 46 minutes, while in two cases, associates told the researchers (who pose as everyday shoppers) they were too busy to unlock cases.
To account for expensive electronics that were locked up far longer than the recent push to lock up everyday items to prevent shoplifting, RDSolutions’s thousands of incognito shoppers—who already make the rounds to stores to research on behalf of its brand and stores clients—sought only items cheaper than $10 to be unlocked.
As for stores that do lock up items that cheap, they found the practice ubiquitous, with every one of the 203 drug stores it surveyed doing so, followed by 88% of the 176 mass-market retailers, and 72% of the 247 grocery stores.
Wait for it: But why? If as many shoppers abandon a purchase as the aforementioned surveys suggest, and the wait times are so long, isn’t the value of the sales lost due to locked cases higher than the shoplifting losses those cases ostensibly prevent?
Lee Kallman, CCO of RDSolutions, told Retail Brew that one thing that his firm has “heard in various forms and fashions” is that store managers today may “have more incentive to prevent loss than to drive sales.” That, said Kallman, is “a little counterintuitive, but it kind of makes sense for why we’re seeing this.”