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We asked our reporters, who play so well with others, to choose a favorite story from 2024 by a Retail Brew colleague.
In an attempt to cut down on organized retail crime—which some retailers have admitted to overplaying—retail chains have been putting their products on shelves under lock and key.
To retrieve an item, shoppers must buzz for attendants and wait (often, for a while) for them to unlock a case. But CVS—Andrew Adam Newman discovered through a little sleuthing on LinkedIn—was testing a new system that lets consumers unlock the cases with their phones at a location in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. And he, always up for putting his boots on the ground, headed there to test the tech himself.
I asked a couple employees about the system—just as a curious shopper, not identifying myself as a reporter—and they were both fans and said shoppers liked it, too. I asked one whether the app would now track whether I ended up purchasing the detergent and would nab me if I didn’t, but she laughed and said that was not how they were using the system.
It was a distinct improvement over my previous locked-case experiences, which often involved pushing the button for assistance, waiting, reviewing my career goals, then flagging down store associates, who often weren’t personally equipped to help but summoned someone who could.
And Andy is nothing if not persistent, continuing to follow the impact these locked cases have on consumers and retailers. This month, to get another perspective on the strategy of jailing products, he caught up with retail expert Joel Bines, who called it the “the single most customer unfriendly” strategy retailers employ. Besides deploying this phone-unlocking tech, he suggested retailers do a bit more heavylifting to combat shoplifting, like putting less stock on shelves or hiring more associates.
Read the original story: We checked out CVS’s pilot program that lets shoppers unlock display cases with their phones—EC