Loblaw’s is testing another scheme to curb foodlifting. And if anything, it’s more aggravating to shoppers than previous methods they’ve tried. This time, they’re locking your cart wheels to keep you from leaving the store…
The guts of a locking grocery cart wheel: No cheap fix, for sure. Plus
the control system and all the wires that have to be installed
in the floors and walls to communicate with the wheels!
Loblaw’s continuing attempts to find a workable means of stopping the theft of food from its stores seems to be triggering even stronger customer backlash than previous tests.
Getting more draconian?
Some observers are saying the systems Loblaw’s is testing to try and stem store thefts are getting more aggravating, more intrusive and more demeaning with every iteration.
One thing is certain: Each successive attempt to find a workable solution to the theft problem is causing greater and more intense customer backlash.
Direct intervention
The chain first installed heavy-duty steel-pipe ‘fences’ between the interior and exterior zones of its stores. Basically isolating the area in which products are displayed from the entry/exit area. The only way out is via the cashier checkouts. Alas, that isn’t doing the job.
Loblaw’s has since tested a scheme by which they don’t let you leave the store until you scan your checkout receipt to prove you paid. If you don’t, the exit gate locks, an alarm sounds and a staffer comes to check your groceries against the receipt manually – before letting you out.
Now, it’s personal…
The latest scheme under test is even more in-your-face. More specifically, in your cart.
There’s apparently a casino-like blanket of hidden surveillance cameras in the stores, monitored constantly, every minute the stores are open. When an observer sees something that might constitute a ‘security concern’, they trigger a wireless control system that locks up the wheels on the suspected perpetrator’s cart.
The trouble is – according to one shopper ‘caught’ by the system – the signal to lock a cart apparently locks all carts in the aisle in question. What a mess!
The worst part of such an experience is waiting – sometimes many minutes – for a staffer to come and unlock your cart. With all the other shoppers in the store gawking and wondering…
Demeaning
Other shoppers report having their cart’s wheels lock up after they’ve checked out and paid.
Joseph Aversa, an assistant professor in the School of Retail Management at Toronto Metropolitan University, says locking carts can be set to a certain time limit or physical boundary when leaving the store after the purchase is made. If either parameter is exceeded, the cart will lock automatically.
“If your buggy locks and store personnel have to come [to unlock] you, the optics around that are very uncomfortable for consumers [that] might ultimately become a deterrent [to theft],” he says.
My Take?
Seems to me – and those quoted in the in the Yahoo! News post which led me to this story – that this new anti-theft tactic will only end up deterring more people from shopping at Loblaw’s.
What I don’t get is, why does Loblaw’s keep implementing anti-theft systems that can’t differentiate between the guilty and the innocent? That tar whole aisles-full of shoppers with the same black brush of suspicion? That have the potential to create such monumental PR problems when they go wrong?
Anybody in the real world – outside the Loblaw’s think tank where the locking-carts idea was no doubt dreamed up – could have warned the Powers-That-Be that the scheme was a ticket to Disasterville…
~ Maggie J.