Lock, Stock, and Peril

Decades ago, my friend Jeff O’Keefe created a great commercial predicting the future of retail shopping. The ad shows a guy walking through the aisles of a market filling his jacket with various items. When he gets to the exit, a store security guard stops him and says, “Excuse me sir, you forgot your receipt.” For years, the ad seemed quite prophetic as the tech to make “just walk out” purchasing became available—and we’ve even seen a version of it deployed in Amazon Go stores. What few of us predicted was that buying things from thousands of terrestrial stores would actually become harder as time passed. That’s because so much merchandise is now behind lock and key. “The practice has since metastasized to so many kinds of products in so many more stores—big-box discounters, beauty retailers, chain pharmacies—that it’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable product galleries armored in plexiglass. The whole thing has a whiff of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops. They, at least, have someone ready and waiting to take things out of lockup. To understand how we got to this demoralizing retail reality, we have to go back to the Great Shoplifting Freak-Out of 2021.” It’s never been quite clear how bad the shoplifting crisis really got. It’s more clear that the imprisoning of products on locked-down shelves is not working out. And as offline shopping becomes more of a pain, online shopping just gets easier and easier. Amanda Mull in Bloomberg (Gift Article): Retailers Locked Up Their Products—and Broke Shopping in America. Maybe my friend Jeff should put his old ad behind a paywall. At least irony is still grab and go.