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.

Keep reading here.—AAN

Locked-display cases, the theft-prevention measure that puts so much of retailers’ inventory behind glass that stores are beginning to resemble claw machine arcades, are not exactly crowd pleasers.

Upon discovering something that they want to purchase is locked, fewer than one in three shoppers (32%) summon an employee to unlock the case, according to a reader survey from Consumer World, a consumer advocacy website. More than half (55%) decide that instead of seeking a similar unlocked product, they’ll try to find it in another store.

But CVS is testing something that could make the locked cases less onerous, a system that enables shoppers to unlock the cases with their phones rather than having to wait for store employees.

For those about to lock: In a LinkedIn post in September, Zachary Dennett, VP of merchandising at CVS, shared a short video revealing what he called a “big milestone for convenience at CVS,” namely that “customers can now unlock products with the app!”

The video showed a locked CVS case filled with vitamins, and an iPhone with the CVS app open being used to unlock it.

Intrigued by the post, which at the time of publication had been reposted 60 times, liked 1,628 times, and drawn 158 comments, I messaged Dennett on LinkedIn and requested an interview. Dennett never responded, but a day later Amy Thibault, lead director of external communications at CVS, emailed that my inquiry had been forwarded to her and that it was “a very small pilot” about which the company was “not ready to share any information.”

Asked over email how many stores were involved in the pilot, their locations, whether a vendor was supplying this technology or the retailer had developed it internally, and why if this was under wraps a CVS executive was posting about it to LinkedIn, Thibault declined to respond to the questions but offered a statement.

“We’re always looking at ways to improve the customer experience,” Thibault wrote. “This pilot is an example of how we’re applying technology as a possible solution and we’re eager to learn more about how it works and is received.”

Upon closer examination, in the short demo that Dennett posted to LinkedIn, when the CVS app was opened it showed the store’s street address. It was in Manhattan.

It was time to go shopping.

Keep reading here.—AAN

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.

Keep reading here.—AAN