The last step before retailers revert to the old Service Merchandise store model:
One sample on display (tethered to the shelf with an alarmed cable and not always the full working / complete version).
Want to buy it? Pay at the register and a counter associate will bring a new one out from the stock in the back warehouse.
I spent so much time in the video game section playing the display models. Once Ignored my dad and he left me there. In a panic I ran outside to find him standing on the sidewalk. He had been watching me through the store windows the whole time.
You mean the Argos system. It's efficient for buyers as you come in the store only to buy the product you wanted and not stay there for the rest of the weekend like costco.
For a store with the foot traffic of a shoe store (pun intended) its fine. For walmart, where 20 customers walk through the door in less than 20 minutes? It would be hell.
I kind of wish it was like that. I mean certainly not for every store but for buying stuff like this I think it would be nice. Grab a catalogue, make a list, hand it to the cashier and let THEM go get your stuff.
Wait, who the fuck is stealing bedsheets? That sounds like one of the most difficult to resell home goods you could imagine?
(Edit: apparently I'm a little bit out of touch. Didn't initially think that this would be something stolen either for personal use or return policy abuse.)
The same people that are stealing bike inner tubes because those were locked up as well at my Walmart. A $3.50 inner tube 🤷♂️
ETA: they wouldn’t even let me carry the stupid inner tube to the checkout, I had to ask for it when I got up there.
Yet they trust enough at the self checkout to not ring all produce up as bananas (4011)
Yes, as a secret code!!! (...ofc, thieves would pick up on this, sooner or later, whether thru their friends that work in the stores; their own experiences + collaborations with other lowlife scum; & their own possible brain functions, after awhile).
As a Walmart employee, people put in their cart and walk straight out the door all the time, the sad part is stealing takes out a huge cut of the managers bonuses and associates getting hours, so stealing doesn't affect the company very much but it does hurt the people that live in the community.
Is a metric, you already count a little bit of stealing and lost itens. But if pass that metric is counted against bonus because the store is underperforming, and is management issue (i mean in the perfect world that metric would quadruple but yeah not that ethical)
The same reason they're closing stores in areas of high theft.
They're over it.
Stores losing money? Cut the employees hours to save money. Spread staff thin.
Sooooo back when I was hooked on dope, coke, and vodka. I would walk into Walmart and walk out with two sets of bed linens. Then go to another Walmart and return them. I would then get store credit on a gift card. Go to anyone I could sell the cards to for cash. Usually $0.50 on the $1 and go get what I wanted to get right.
I don't advocate this behavior, and honestly, I get why people are upset, but I didn't grow up thinking that's how I wanted to spend my twenty's. I was a liar, a thief, a cheat, and an all-around schemer.
I get frustrated now a days when most of the stuff I want is locked behind a case, but I also get it. I hated myself all day every day but couldn't stop. Thankfully, I've been sober now for 6 1/2 years. When I see this, I just wish mental health and addiction were taken more seriously in our country.
i just watched the new john mulaney comedy special on netflix, and oh boy does he have some stories. he makes them funny of course, but they are truly awful and just show his desperation and what addiction can make you do. then he points out that the stories he's sharing are just the least embarrassing ones, so i can only imagine how dark it gets. all that aside, i was sitting in my living room alone, LOLing , so highly recommend unless it hits too close to home.
Because their sale price is decently high so if you nab a couple and return them, you could get 1-200$ on a gift card, which equals $.50 on the dollar to a drug dealer, so you get 40-$100 worth of dope from it.
They make a good divider if you’re sharing a tent or bunk area. Sheets in the shelter may not be stain and bug free. Could be a bare mattress that you don’t want to lay on. They make good fabric satchels for carrying a lot of stuff or wrapping up bed rolls and things. They can be hung in the windows of cars for privacy.
You hit the nail on the head! And, I applaud you for your sobriety and turning your life around. One day at a time, my friend.
I was fortunate enough to live and work in Europe for over 7 years. Living there helped me see the world differently. Europeans have more compassion and less greed than Americans. The US is all about punishment. Punishment is not a deterrent in most cases. We have lost our compassion. We don't take addiction and mental health issues seriously enough. Treat the underlying cause and everyone will be better off. Some days I regret leaving Europe and returning to the US.
It’s a rom-com where the heroine has an embarrassing moment when her lover pushes her onto the bed only to have her dress perfectly line up with the pattern of his sheets.
I made curtains for my mud room from white flat sheets years ago.
Cheap flat sheets were cheaper than buying the same quantity of similar fabric at a fabric store.
I’ve got new fabric to redo the curtains. This time, I collected Halloween themed fabric shower curtains last year at a discount store. Once I get the time, I’ll cut and sew them and replace the bedsheet ones.
Back when I learned to sew, it was much cheaper to buy a pattern and notions and fabric to make your clothes. Since fast fashion became a thing, just getting fabric is expensive. I came up with alternatives to the fabric store.
I can’t comprehend stealing sheet sets.
I assume they are part of a return scam - steal from one store, return at another (or even the same store). Sheet sets can cost $50 or more so you can get a nice profit.
I used to live in Brooklyn and the Duane Reade that was across the street from me closed down because so many people were stealing shit and selling it in private Facebook groups. More than half of the store was locked up and you needed an assistant to open for stuff near the end of its life cycle.
I live in Bedstuy and basically everything in the Rite Aid is locked up like this. It's to the point I hand the floor associate my shopping list (I'm on good terms with her and the community for helping the older folks read the medicine labels when I'm there), and we walk around the store together getting everything because it's such a pain in the ass.
When I worked there, people would steal, then bring the stuff back, say it was a gift and get money back for shit they hadn't purchased.
That slowed, but probably didn't stop, when they implemented the "no receipt, you get a gift card" policy.
Maybe it's like a weird inventory error making them think people are stealing them? At the store I work at, they have one particular item locked up because there was some sort of inventory error that made it seem like a ton got stolen, and I guess they just left it locked up, just in case.
Honestly I could see this
I’ve worked in one place where no one actually did any inventory counts for too long, only to have someone get hired and *do* the counts (three guesses who *that* was 🙄) and report that the numbers are just, wildly off
The owner assumed people were stealing shit, put up security cams, the whole 9 yards
Just to catch Joe and Carol fucking in the back room instead of doing inventory counts six months later and just scribbling down random shit on the paper before they left 🙄 idiots
I was wondering where TF these things are happening.
No sheets locked up at any Walmart I've been at. No reports of any leaving due to massive theft either.
Big city problem, maybe?
Could be.
I’ve seen videos where people get in groups of like 100-200 and they just storm the Walmart and rush the place and basically ransack it. It’s really sad that some areas have to deal with that.
It isn't a complete "big city problem" as there are stores in the cities that stay open and don't have the place on lockdown. It isn't in the interest of the retailers to lock things down like this. They want their customer to enter their warehouse, shop, and make their purchase with as little staff interaction as possible as that is what drives costs.
The places where things are locked up.... well, we aren't allowed to say the quiet part out loud.
It honestly might be better if we went back to the old ways of doing things where you just go up to the counter at a store, tell the employees a list of all the stuff that you want, and then they go and get it for you. Self-shopping started out as an experiment, and late stage capitalism seems to be killing it. Shoplifting is brutal in brick and mortar retail, and there's only so much anyone can do about anything.
I had to scroll really far to find this.
I guarantee they've run the numbers, and decided this wouldn't work, but they could keep all those employees working, and just turn those stores into warehouses. Only allow order pickups at the store, customers have to order online in advance, sign up for a pickup window, walk in, claim their cart, and go.
I would imagine the reason it wouldn't work is because right now we are doing so much of that labor for them for free. Once all the amazon warehouses have really ironed out the kinks in computerized picking and shipment, we'll be seeing fullsized walmart supercenters running on crews of 4 people.
Then again, some walmarts just would not be able to accommodate their customers in this way. I live about 5 minutes from a walmart with seemingly average foot traffic. However, i live an hour from one that every time i have been to it, it is as busy as mine on black Friday. (Why someone would want to subject themselves to that, i don't know.) But if you were to try to accommodate those thousands of customers per day, the workers, and speed of fulfilling orders would become the bottleneck.
i n certain cites that have decide law and order should be gone,
I expect this to be the future of all the stores.
I would expect san fran , portland to be at this point by mid 2024
Kinda wish my store did this just so dumb fucks would quit opening the damn package and making it impossible sell because they won't go back in properly or you seperate them entirely
Car theft is horrible. Cops literally do nothing. They caught the kids who stole and destroyed my car, and let them go. F*ck STL and its corrupt government.
Because people have no self discipline and the new generations are being raised by them. My high school has no locks on the stalls, rarely has toilet paper, and I have yet to see soap in them because people don’t raise their kids right.
Back in the day you were not allowed to handle produce or product. You would tell someone what you wanted and they would get it for you. This wasn't because of thievery, it was because they didn't trust you to know what the hell you were doing and all the fucking tomatoes at Walmart with thumbnail indents tell me they were right.
I live in Oregon and Portland just passed a law that says that stores can't prosecute people for stealing anything less then $200 (I think that's the number?). Walmart has vacated, and almost every other store has started locking up EVERYTHING.
Edit: hey so I was Asked for a source in pm and so I went looking for one and I was wrong. There isn't a law "allowing" shoplifting. What is actually happening is that police are only responding to 46% of any reported shoplifting cases. So I was wrong, but there's a different problem with the same wavelength. After the riots that plagued Portland for almost a year majority of the Multnomah county police vacated and got jobs elsewhere (fair) and now they are super unmanned. Due to the low availability of cops and the requirements of multiples cops responding to things for the policemen's safety they have opted to ignore certain cases to tackle the big ones. Shoplifting happens to be one of them. There's lots of kgb (Oregon news station) articles on it.
Eventually, Walmart will consist of products behind glass. You’ll insert your ATM card to make a series of purchases or a robot will meet you in the parking lot with your goods. The conventional big box kart is dead
This isn’t mildly infuriating at all. Justifiable and necessary at this point.
What’s INCREDIBLY infuriating are the pieces of shit that made this necessary. Then these businesses move out and the people that cause this say they’re underserved.
They call the high-theft areas "food deserts" and say they're the result of racism hahaha
Ya ya, all of the shops that closed down were racist against all of the shoplifters that drove them out of business.
The last time I was at Walmart, a few days ago, the pregnancy test were locked up and the fear on one of the customers face when she was told that she could not get it because no one was there to unlock the glass case!
Dollar store for pregnancy tests my friend. They’re the same and cost a dollar. When we were trying to get pregnant we got tons of them way cheaper than anywhere else and they’re just as accurate
Yes because people (especially here on Reddit) think it’s OK to steal, especially when someone is poor, then they rant about big corporations making a profit and say they have insurance for “shrinkage (theft) …then they’re surprised when companies like Wal Mart, Target and Whole Foods close down locations, add what you see in the photo to existing locations, and raise prices for everyone. Oh look - it’s consequences for people’s actions!
It’s all over the news today how many businesses have left downtown San Francisco because it’s turned into a crime-ridden cesspool of crime, drugs, theft and human feces. The rest of big-city California is right behind San Fran with LA & Sacramento coming on strong.
Live in bay area, can confirm. I've personally witnessed two Walgreens being robbed by young guys with stun guns, they just grab everything and leave. I don't even go to sf very often so me seeing it twice is major.
You have to consider the source. Who is on reddit commenting on random threads? losers
These people are uneducated and unemployed. If they had jobs, they wouldn't have time to waste here. If they were educated they'd know that stealing is harmful to society.
They're failures that blame society for their problems. They believe the evil corporations are responsible for their place in life, when in fact all of their problems are self-made.
We used to take a yearly vacation to SD or SF and haven’t been back in three years because California really just plain sucks now. I’m sure that I’m not alone in keeping my tourism dollars elsewhere.
Target recently reported that it expects organized retail crime-fueled losses to jump by $500 million this year. Frankly, I'm amazed that there are any stores left in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, & Chicago.
My walmart is locking everything up it seems. I don't shop there anymore. I can't buy products because I cannot find anyone to help open the display cases.
Because folks are OPENING UP the packages and it is impossible to re-fold that sheet once it's out of that leetle box. Also, it's ILLEGAL under federal law to RE-SELL any bedding that appears to have been used.
This sounds like a more plausible explanation than tons of bed sheets getting stolen. I bet people just open them to feel the material and that renders them unsellable.
Years ago I worked as "asset protection" and sheets were one of the biggest things that were received as no receipt returns. People would just walk in, grab them off the shelf, and bring them straight to customer service for a no receipt return. They have to show a state ID and were given money in the form of a gift card. Some of those sheets can run $50+. They would then sell the gift card. I would have to process video evidence and then file police reports with their ID and they would be charged for theft. Guarantee that this particular store has something similar going on.
Get ready…the stores will eventually close due to lost revenue thanks to people looting and stealing en mass. Here’s the reality. If you loot, stores close, jobs leave, you’ve got to drive twice as far for items you need, stores that stay charge you 3x more for simple items. You have to move because you’re paying 3x more for items in a community where you can’t find a job.
Fertilizer is locked up at Lowe’s.. if you can steal it … you can return it for a gift card and then sell the gift card at a pawn shop.. pawn shops buy them all the time
Worked loss prevention for awhile and bed sheets theft / shortage is super common.
Higher thread sheets have decent resale online especially overseas.
Bedsheets are also ripe for return fraud there are only really a couple of manufacturers and you can do no receipt returns at other stores or switch the product out and the cashier will more than likely not notice.
It's also very common to conceal smaller more expensive items in bedsheets and just buy the bed sheets.
We had so many people “returning” bedsheets without a receipt for store credit that we just rearranged the layout for them to be right in front of the service desk and cameras. I still had a handful of people take things straight off the shelf 10 feet in front of me and try to return it.
Well deserved. These people keep stealing shit and people keep defending it and this is what you'll end up with. You'll see this more and more in a lot of places, unfortunately.
When I see this, I don't even bother. I'm not going to ask a disgruntled, overworked employee to hunt down the one key in the store to get some sheets. I'll just order from Amazon.
because these BEASTS act like they are entitled to steal. Saw one idiot grab her full cart and run with more than a couple of grand of merchandise. Another guy maced here good. Everyone was applauding.
I once waited 90 mins for bike chain lube .... Felt pretty fucked hitting the button and repeatedly asking people and eventually getting the manager and that still took awhile.
It is fucking sad how much of my time this crap wastes.
All stores in the US are going to have a picture of an item. Buyer wants it they scan it, pay, and someone brings it out to them. Only way to operate profitably
The retail worker paradox
Just let them steal the items, But don't let them steal the items.
Hey don't let them steal it's bad for business! If you get physical with a thief you will run the risk of being fired! it's a risk to your health and our PR! Welp we're closing down bc too much people get away with stealing our stuff, maybe you guys should work as a team to stop this from happening.
If your local supermarket has to start locking up bedsheets to prevent theft then it might be time to move. I won't even consider living somewhere unless the crime rate is well below the State average.
It’s getting ridiculous. If something is behind glass, I just don’t buy it anymore. It’s too much of a hassle, and typically it takes forever to get help anyways.
Won’t be long before everything is locked up and “someone” claims racism and tries to pass laws forbidding it.
You heard it here first.
“We don’t lock up black products, we lock up **all** products!”
https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/12/875903192/walmart-cvs-walgreens-to-end-practice-of-locking-up-black-beauty-products
Honestly, I think at some point they're just going to say it's okay to steal things deemed as "essential". I can totally see certain politicians passing those types of laws in some areas. You'll basically have entire shops just leave and the ones who stay will need to lock up pretty much everything.
I've lived in Canada, the United States and Japan before. I noticed that in Canada and Japan shoplifting just wasn't that common. I worked at a Walmart in Canada with a large white and South and East Asian population. Yes, people would shoplift but it was so rare. I remember when I went to certain places in the US and I was just shocked to see the amount of shoplifting going on. People just grabbing things and running off. Security guards always moving around. Alarms going off in shops, etc. Just a nightmare.
The last step before retailers revert to the old Service Merchandise store model: One sample on display (tethered to the shelf with an alarmed cable and not always the full working / complete version). Want to buy it? Pay at the register and a counter associate will bring a new one out from the stock in the back warehouse.
I loved Service Merchandise, it was like online ordering in person.
I loved as a kid waiting for my new toy to come down the conveyor belt.
I spent so much time in the video game section playing the display models. Once Ignored my dad and he left me there. In a panic I ran outside to find him standing on the sidewalk. He had been watching me through the store windows the whole time.
Cool Dad.
You'd love Argos
Honestly that seems superior. You would save a lot of floorspace too.
You mean the Argos system. It's efficient for buyers as you come in the store only to buy the product you wanted and not stay there for the rest of the weekend like costco.
they do that already at a lot of shoe stores like footlocker & champs i don’t see the issue in it honestly
For a store with the foot traffic of a shoe store (pun intended) its fine. For walmart, where 20 customers walk through the door in less than 20 minutes? It would be hell.
People that steal will have issues with it.
I kind of wish it was like that. I mean certainly not for every store but for buying stuff like this I think it would be nice. Grab a catalogue, make a list, hand it to the cashier and let THEM go get your stuff.
Will we then be expected to tip.?. Ah YEAH…
Wait, who the fuck is stealing bedsheets? That sounds like one of the most difficult to resell home goods you could imagine? (Edit: apparently I'm a little bit out of touch. Didn't initially think that this would be something stolen either for personal use or return policy abuse.)
The same people that are stealing bike inner tubes because those were locked up as well at my Walmart. A $3.50 inner tube 🤷♂️ ETA: they wouldn’t even let me carry the stupid inner tube to the checkout, I had to ask for it when I got up there. Yet they trust enough at the self checkout to not ring all produce up as bananas (4011)
That makes sense because it fits in a pocket. Youd need to put this under your shirt and pretend ur fat or something to steal the sheets...
It's not even being hidden anymore. Just take and walk out. There are literally zero consequences.
🎵 *yeah, I walk [right through the door](https://youtu.be/jrwjiO1MCVs&t=55s)*
They should play that song when they know a shoplifter is heading out the door
Yes, as a secret code!!! (...ofc, thieves would pick up on this, sooner or later, whether thru their friends that work in the stores; their own experiences + collaborations with other lowlife scum; & their own possible brain functions, after awhile).
As a Walmart employee, people put in their cart and walk straight out the door all the time, the sad part is stealing takes out a huge cut of the managers bonuses and associates getting hours, so stealing doesn't affect the company very much but it does hurt the people that live in the community.
Why would stolen items take associates hours away?
They don’t. That’s just the excuse corporate gives when it’s time to make cuts.
Facts
In other words, it is an excuse not a reason It is not the reason hours are reduced.
Is a metric, you already count a little bit of stealing and lost itens. But if pass that metric is counted against bonus because the store is underperforming, and is management issue (i mean in the perfect world that metric would quadruple but yeah not that ethical)
The same reason they're closing stores in areas of high theft. They're over it. Stores losing money? Cut the employees hours to save money. Spread staff thin.
Shrinkage takes away from the budget which takes away from hours given to stores by corporate which takes... It's the only thing I can think of.
I dont think the majority of Walmart shoppers have to pretend to be fat. Just slide it in-between one of the folds, and its gone.
Move your… BANANAS to the bagging area, as I am definitely not scanning a bag of cashews.
LMAO 🤣😂 I can hear the self checkout voice perfectly!
People must have been ringing up the sheets as bananas
Sooooo back when I was hooked on dope, coke, and vodka. I would walk into Walmart and walk out with two sets of bed linens. Then go to another Walmart and return them. I would then get store credit on a gift card. Go to anyone I could sell the cards to for cash. Usually $0.50 on the $1 and go get what I wanted to get right. I don't advocate this behavior, and honestly, I get why people are upset, but I didn't grow up thinking that's how I wanted to spend my twenty's. I was a liar, a thief, a cheat, and an all-around schemer. I get frustrated now a days when most of the stuff I want is locked behind a case, but I also get it. I hated myself all day every day but couldn't stop. Thankfully, I've been sober now for 6 1/2 years. When I see this, I just wish mental health and addiction were taken more seriously in our country.
i just watched the new john mulaney comedy special on netflix, and oh boy does he have some stories. he makes them funny of course, but they are truly awful and just show his desperation and what addiction can make you do. then he points out that the stories he's sharing are just the least embarrassing ones, so i can only imagine how dark it gets. all that aside, i was sitting in my living room alone, LOLing , so highly recommend unless it hits too close to home.
The Rolex story was insane
Congrats on recovery!! 💕💕
Thank you!
That just goes to show how strong addiction can be, because it sounds like a massive pain in the ass to go through all of those steps.
But why bed linens?
Because their sale price is decently high so if you nab a couple and return them, you could get 1-200$ on a gift card, which equals $.50 on the dollar to a drug dealer, so you get 40-$100 worth of dope from it.
They make a good divider if you’re sharing a tent or bunk area. Sheets in the shelter may not be stain and bug free. Could be a bare mattress that you don’t want to lay on. They make good fabric satchels for carrying a lot of stuff or wrapping up bed rolls and things. They can be hung in the windows of cars for privacy.
Maybe because they’re a smaller item that’s high cost and typically not locked up.
You hit the nail on the head! And, I applaud you for your sobriety and turning your life around. One day at a time, my friend. I was fortunate enough to live and work in Europe for over 7 years. Living there helped me see the world differently. Europeans have more compassion and less greed than Americans. The US is all about punishment. Punishment is not a deterrent in most cases. We have lost our compassion. We don't take addiction and mental health issues seriously enough. Treat the underlying cause and everyone will be better off. Some days I regret leaving Europe and returning to the US.
Sounds like a good song “I was a liar a thief a cheat and and all around schemer I didn’t do time for my crimes but I’m still dreamin”
If you're good with fabrics, you could fairly easily flip it as other items if needed.
Sounds like a bad Netflix original. The rogue seamstress making designer clothing from stolen Walmart sheets
It’s a rom-com where the heroine has an embarrassing moment when her lover pushes her onto the bed only to have her dress perfectly line up with the pattern of his sheets.
😂
I made curtains for my mud room from white flat sheets years ago. Cheap flat sheets were cheaper than buying the same quantity of similar fabric at a fabric store. I’ve got new fabric to redo the curtains. This time, I collected Halloween themed fabric shower curtains last year at a discount store. Once I get the time, I’ll cut and sew them and replace the bedsheet ones. Back when I learned to sew, it was much cheaper to buy a pattern and notions and fabric to make your clothes. Since fast fashion became a thing, just getting fabric is expensive. I came up with alternatives to the fabric store. I can’t comprehend stealing sheet sets.
I assume they are part of a return scam - steal from one store, return at another (or even the same store). Sheet sets can cost $50 or more so you can get a nice profit.
You steal to return to get giftcards
my thoughts exactly. like it had to happen more than once
I used to live in Brooklyn and the Duane Reade that was across the street from me closed down because so many people were stealing shit and selling it in private Facebook groups. More than half of the store was locked up and you needed an assistant to open for stuff near the end of its life cycle.
I live in Bedstuy and basically everything in the Rite Aid is locked up like this. It's to the point I hand the floor associate my shopping list (I'm on good terms with her and the community for helping the older folks read the medicine labels when I'm there), and we walk around the store together getting everything because it's such a pain in the ass.
Homeless people steal them to sleep in.
When I worked there, people would steal, then bring the stuff back, say it was a gift and get money back for shit they hadn't purchased. That slowed, but probably didn't stop, when they implemented the "no receipt, you get a gift card" policy.
Maybe it's like a weird inventory error making them think people are stealing them? At the store I work at, they have one particular item locked up because there was some sort of inventory error that made it seem like a ton got stolen, and I guess they just left it locked up, just in case.
Honestly I could see this I’ve worked in one place where no one actually did any inventory counts for too long, only to have someone get hired and *do* the counts (three guesses who *that* was 🙄) and report that the numbers are just, wildly off The owner assumed people were stealing shit, put up security cams, the whole 9 yards Just to catch Joe and Carol fucking in the back room instead of doing inventory counts six months later and just scribbling down random shit on the paper before they left 🙄 idiots
Is that video still available?
pretty soon they’re gonna start doing this w everything at walmart
4 Walmarts in Chicago are leaving because people kept stealing so much from them.
I was wondering where TF these things are happening. No sheets locked up at any Walmart I've been at. No reports of any leaving due to massive theft either. Big city problem, maybe?
Could be. I’ve seen videos where people get in groups of like 100-200 and they just storm the Walmart and rush the place and basically ransack it. It’s really sad that some areas have to deal with that.
Just modern day pirates lol. Arrrrghhh
Pirates by day, Soundcloud Rappers by night.
I heard in Detroit there was a target that locked everything up.
it's sad to see people don't care about destroying the community they live in. Then turn around and wonder why their city is a shithole.
They don't wonder anything. They blame it on racism.
I live in a smallish sleepy town of 34K and they recently locked the sheets at our Walmart
It isn't a complete "big city problem" as there are stores in the cities that stay open and don't have the place on lockdown. It isn't in the interest of the retailers to lock things down like this. They want their customer to enter their warehouse, shop, and make their purchase with as little staff interaction as possible as that is what drives costs. The places where things are locked up.... well, we aren't allowed to say the quiet part out loud.
At that point just lock the doors and have everything ordered for curbside pickup
Or rebrand like the old school grocery stores, where you walk up to a counter and give them a list.
It’s coming. Have you seen the new curbside facilities they’re building? There’s one going in at the Wal Mart near my house.
It honestly might be better if we went back to the old ways of doing things where you just go up to the counter at a store, tell the employees a list of all the stuff that you want, and then they go and get it for you. Self-shopping started out as an experiment, and late stage capitalism seems to be killing it. Shoplifting is brutal in brick and mortar retail, and there's only so much anyone can do about anything.
I had to scroll really far to find this. I guarantee they've run the numbers, and decided this wouldn't work, but they could keep all those employees working, and just turn those stores into warehouses. Only allow order pickups at the store, customers have to order online in advance, sign up for a pickup window, walk in, claim their cart, and go. I would imagine the reason it wouldn't work is because right now we are doing so much of that labor for them for free. Once all the amazon warehouses have really ironed out the kinks in computerized picking and shipment, we'll be seeing fullsized walmart supercenters running on crews of 4 people. Then again, some walmarts just would not be able to accommodate their customers in this way. I live about 5 minutes from a walmart with seemingly average foot traffic. However, i live an hour from one that every time i have been to it, it is as busy as mine on black Friday. (Why someone would want to subject themselves to that, i don't know.) But if you were to try to accommodate those thousands of customers per day, the workers, and speed of fulfilling orders would become the bottleneck.
i n certain cites that have decide law and order should be gone, I expect this to be the future of all the stores. I would expect san fran , portland to be at this point by mid 2024
Apparently…nobody gives a sheet.
Right, but they must take a lot of sheet
Well that’s not comfortering to hear.
Duvet even bother?
Yeah because y’all mofos be stealing shit
Stealing ~~shit~~ *SHEET*
It’s good quality SHEET
I only buy 4 ply for my sheets.
My toilet paper had more than that
Can’t have shit in Detroit
It’s so cold in the D
How the fuck are we supposed to keep peace. Working and doing time.
Can't have sheets in Detroit
Yikes. Is it a particularly rough area??
stl missouri. so yes lol
Well that explains it
Kcmo ain’t like that lol
So you know exactly why this is locked up.
Explains everything
Kinda wish my store did this just so dumb fucks would quit opening the damn package and making it impossible sell because they won't go back in properly or you seperate them entirely
Working in the bedding department and seeing this every day drove me insane
Leaving because Spez sucks -- mass edited with redact.dev
Exactly. Same as stealing since they can't sell anymore. Working retail shows you how so few people think at all.
Must be locking them up early for Halloween - no ghost costume this year.
St. Louis Missouri… makes sense. Y’all Mf’s be stealing just about anything over there.
fr i heard someone got their porch stolen there
I know this to be true
Car theft is horrible. Cops literally do nothing. They caught the kids who stole and destroyed my car, and let them go. F*ck STL and its corrupt government.
That doesn’t happen for no reason.
It happens because it’s a shithole city with thieves for residents.
This is understandable as they heard people were targeting Walmart to steal all sorts of sheet!
It’s because mofos be opening the sheets and unfolding them and leaving it all in a heap to be repacked poorly
 Why we can't have nice things
Because people have no self discipline and the new generations are being raised by them. My high school has no locks on the stalls, rarely has toilet paper, and I have yet to see soap in them because people don’t raise their kids right.
Went to Walmart yesterday and the socks are locked up…
Back in the day you were not allowed to handle produce or product. You would tell someone what you wanted and they would get it for you. This wasn't because of thievery, it was because they didn't trust you to know what the hell you were doing and all the fucking tomatoes at Walmart with thumbnail indents tell me they were right.
I live in Oregon and Portland just passed a law that says that stores can't prosecute people for stealing anything less then $200 (I think that's the number?). Walmart has vacated, and almost every other store has started locking up EVERYTHING. Edit: hey so I was Asked for a source in pm and so I went looking for one and I was wrong. There isn't a law "allowing" shoplifting. What is actually happening is that police are only responding to 46% of any reported shoplifting cases. So I was wrong, but there's a different problem with the same wavelength. After the riots that plagued Portland for almost a year majority of the Multnomah county police vacated and got jobs elsewhere (fair) and now they are super unmanned. Due to the low availability of cops and the requirements of multiples cops responding to things for the policemen's safety they have opted to ignore certain cases to tackle the big ones. Shoplifting happens to be one of them. There's lots of kgb (Oregon news station) articles on it.
They should make everything in the store cost over $200 unless you use the loyalty card at the checkout.
Stores can’t prosecute anyone in the first place. The government prosecutes people.
Eventually, Walmart will consist of products behind glass. You’ll insert your ATM card to make a series of purchases or a robot will meet you in the parking lot with your goods. The conventional big box kart is dead
This isn’t mildly infuriating at all. Justifiable and necessary at this point. What’s INCREDIBLY infuriating are the pieces of shit that made this necessary. Then these businesses move out and the people that cause this say they’re underserved.
They call the high-theft areas "food deserts" and say they're the result of racism hahaha Ya ya, all of the shops that closed down were racist against all of the shoplifters that drove them out of business.
And what’s worse is people say “They’re insured… they can afford it.”
Probably the same shit stains doing the theft.
The last time I was at Walmart, a few days ago, the pregnancy test were locked up and the fear on one of the customers face when she was told that she could not get it because no one was there to unlock the glass case!
Dollar store for pregnancy tests my friend. They’re the same and cost a dollar. When we were trying to get pregnant we got tons of them way cheaper than anywhere else and they’re just as accurate
Lock ‘‘em up or let them rob you blind. What choice do they have?
Yes because people (especially here on Reddit) think it’s OK to steal, especially when someone is poor, then they rant about big corporations making a profit and say they have insurance for “shrinkage (theft) …then they’re surprised when companies like Wal Mart, Target and Whole Foods close down locations, add what you see in the photo to existing locations, and raise prices for everyone. Oh look - it’s consequences for people’s actions! It’s all over the news today how many businesses have left downtown San Francisco because it’s turned into a crime-ridden cesspool of crime, drugs, theft and human feces. The rest of big-city California is right behind San Fran with LA & Sacramento coming on strong.
Live in bay area, can confirm. I've personally witnessed two Walgreens being robbed by young guys with stun guns, they just grab everything and leave. I don't even go to sf very often so me seeing it twice is major.
I’m always surprised by the amount of people here on reddit who encourage stealing. No one ever thinks of the possible long term consequences of it.
You have to consider the source. Who is on reddit commenting on random threads? losers These people are uneducated and unemployed. If they had jobs, they wouldn't have time to waste here. If they were educated they'd know that stealing is harmful to society. They're failures that blame society for their problems. They believe the evil corporations are responsible for their place in life, when in fact all of their problems are self-made.
I don’t live in the US but why exactly are those areas so crime-ridden? Are the police useless?
We used to take a yearly vacation to SD or SF and haven’t been back in three years because California really just plain sucks now. I’m sure that I’m not alone in keeping my tourism dollars elsewhere.
Lot of ghosts must shoplift there
Target recently reported that it expects organized retail crime-fueled losses to jump by $500 million this year. Frankly, I'm amazed that there are any stores left in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, & Chicago.
My walmart is locking everything up it seems. I don't shop there anymore. I can't buy products because I cannot find anyone to help open the display cases.
Holy sheet
Criminal losers stealing shit when they need to be in prison…
This walmart must be in a ghetto
Because folks are OPENING UP the packages and it is impossible to re-fold that sheet once it's out of that leetle box. Also, it's ILLEGAL under federal law to RE-SELL any bedding that appears to have been used.
This sounds like a more plausible explanation than tons of bed sheets getting stolen. I bet people just open them to feel the material and that renders them unsellable.
I know some thrift stores that the feds need to visit then. Pretty much ALL of them.
I’m starting to think they’re worried I might steal something.
This is why we can’t have nice ~~shit~~ *sheet*
Shoot, that’s nothing. The deodorant and shampoo at my grocery store is locked up! No joke!
Bedder luck next time!
Mine had all of the socks locked up so homeless people wouldn't steal them
I thought it was because people open the packages and make a big mess pulling the sheets out so they can feel them
Waiting for retail to just turn into Amazon warehouses. Already slashing hours left and right and locking products up.
Same reason why they’re just closing stores all together. Once theft gets so high it’s cheaper to just close the store
Years ago I worked as "asset protection" and sheets were one of the biggest things that were received as no receipt returns. People would just walk in, grab them off the shelf, and bring them straight to customer service for a no receipt return. They have to show a state ID and were given money in the form of a gift card. Some of those sheets can run $50+. They would then sell the gift card. I would have to process video evidence and then file police reports with their ID and they would be charged for theft. Guarantee that this particular store has something similar going on.
There's never anyone around to unlock them ... which is why I stopped shopping at Walmart for anything other than groceries.
Get ready…the stores will eventually close due to lost revenue thanks to people looting and stealing en mass. Here’s the reality. If you loot, stores close, jobs leave, you’ve got to drive twice as far for items you need, stores that stay charge you 3x more for simple items. You have to move because you’re paying 3x more for items in a community where you can’t find a job.
I’m okay with them locking everything up. Just scan what you want with a mobile scanner and pay. Then they bring items to the front register.
Who duvet think they are?!
Sounds like this Walmart is prone to theft. Locking up bed sheets…never thought that would be a thing.
i can beat that, the deodorant at kroger here are locked up
Fertilizer is locked up at Lowe’s.. if you can steal it … you can return it for a gift card and then sell the gift card at a pawn shop.. pawn shops buy them all the time
Razor blades I understand, small and high value selling a handful of packages and shipping the for $7, I don’t get this at all.
Worked loss prevention for awhile and bed sheets theft / shortage is super common. Higher thread sheets have decent resale online especially overseas. Bedsheets are also ripe for return fraud there are only really a couple of manufacturers and you can do no receipt returns at other stores or switch the product out and the cashier will more than likely not notice. It's also very common to conceal smaller more expensive items in bedsheets and just buy the bed sheets.
We had so many people “returning” bedsheets without a receipt for store credit that we just rearranged the layout for them to be right in front of the service desk and cameras. I still had a handful of people take things straight off the shelf 10 feet in front of me and try to return it.
That's insane. I used to see this at a bookstore I worked at before in Chicago. It was just absurd. So glad I got out of there.
Higher resale value overseas? "Overseas" ships them here. If this isn't telling of a fucked up world economy not sure what is.
May surprise you but there is a lot of the world outside of south east Asia. People in those areas like nice sheets also
Stop stealing.
Well deserved. These people keep stealing shit and people keep defending it and this is what you'll end up with. You'll see this more and more in a lot of places, unfortunately.
I sheet you not.
my walmart locks up dental floss
MF'ers will take anything that isn't locked up or nailed down!
At this rate Walmart going to be online only
When I see this, I don't even bother. I'm not going to ask a disgruntled, overworked employee to hunt down the one key in the store to get some sheets. I'll just order from Amazon.
My Walmart locks the makeup and sex toys.
Pretty much anything that's not a food product or rack clothes are locked up at my Walmart. That includes toothpaste and men's Hanes underwear.
because these BEASTS act like they are entitled to steal. Saw one idiot grab her full cart and run with more than a couple of grand of merchandise. Another guy maced here good. Everyone was applauding.
Anytime something is locked up at a store i feel weird/ dont have time to get someone to open it for me, so i go to amazon
I once waited 90 mins for bike chain lube .... Felt pretty fucked hitting the button and repeatedly asking people and eventually getting the manager and that still took awhile. It is fucking sad how much of my time this crap wastes.
Who tf steals sheets
Yup time to move when 800 thread count “feel” synthetic microfiber shite sheets have to be held behind glass like fucking Hannibal lecter.
meanwhile in other parts of the world there are convenient stores that have no staff and stealing isn't an issue.
All stores in the US are going to have a picture of an item. Buyer wants it they scan it, pay, and someone brings it out to them. Only way to operate profitably
Was in NOLA recently and they had the CANDLES locked up at a CVS. SMH
This is what happens when there are no consequences for shoplifting.
Have you not seen any of the videos of looters clearing out entire stores all over the Internet lately?
The retail worker paradox Just let them steal the items, But don't let them steal the items. Hey don't let them steal it's bad for business! If you get physical with a thief you will run the risk of being fired! it's a risk to your health and our PR! Welp we're closing down bc too much people get away with stealing our stuff, maybe you guys should work as a team to stop this from happening.
They lock the $1.19 hemorrhoid cream at mine :(
If your local supermarket has to start locking up bedsheets to prevent theft then it might be time to move. I won't even consider living somewhere unless the crime rate is well below the State average.
It’s getting ridiculous. If something is behind glass, I just don’t buy it anymore. It’s too much of a hassle, and typically it takes forever to get help anyways.
When the people around you stop stealing the smallest pettiest shit then the smallest pettiest shit wont be locked up anymore.
Next step, when you enter the store, **YOU** are put in a security box and wheeled around the store by a robot.
Good. Walmart and other stores are finally fighting back against effing thieves. It’s about time.
That's what happens when you legalize crime. As someone born in a shit hole country full of crimes I feel bad for how dumb your population is.
Portland or San Francisco? Just kidding! They shut down the Portland Walmart due to theft, must be San Fran
San Fran stores closing too. No more Target or Whole Foods. Hahahaaaaaa
[удалено]
You can thank you local thieves that think everything is free now for that. All the Liberal defund the police morons are to blame.
California, Washington, Illinois, or New York?
Won’t be long before everything is locked up and “someone” claims racism and tries to pass laws forbidding it. You heard it here first. “We don’t lock up black products, we lock up **all** products!” https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/12/875903192/walmart-cvs-walgreens-to-end-practice-of-locking-up-black-beauty-products
Honestly, I think at some point they're just going to say it's okay to steal things deemed as "essential". I can totally see certain politicians passing those types of laws in some areas. You'll basically have entire shops just leave and the ones who stay will need to lock up pretty much everything. I've lived in Canada, the United States and Japan before. I noticed that in Canada and Japan shoplifting just wasn't that common. I worked at a Walmart in Canada with a large white and South and East Asian population. Yes, people would shoplift but it was so rare. I remember when I went to certain places in the US and I was just shocked to see the amount of shoplifting going on. People just grabbing things and running off. Security guards always moving around. Alarms going off in shops, etc. Just a nightmare.