At several drug stores across Southern California, security is tight. If customers want decongestant, razors, or other items, they must summon an employee to unlock the merchandise. LA Times Hugo Martín wrote about why these items are locked up and joined Lisa McRee on “LA Times Today.”
The National Retail Federation estimates that last year retailers lost about $35 billion in products to shoplifters and organized retail theft. Martín talked about the thefts.
“This comes from the incidents that retailers have been telling us about, where someone will come in with a large bag, sometimes a trash bag, and they’ll just use their arms and just swipe a whole shelf-load of items into the bag and walk out. Because, in most cases, drugstores are not going to have security on hand and their employees are not going to jump in front of a thief to try to stop them,” Martín explained.
Los Angeles, in particular, has been ranked as the city with the biggest retail theft problems by the National Retail Federation. Items like phone chargers, razors, medicine, and more have been put behind glass to try to deter thefts. Martín visited several stores in the Los Angeles area to see which stores had added security measures and what items they kept locked away.
“If you go to one CVS in Pasadena and in a CVS in Southgate, the items that were in plexiglass were not the same items at the two stores, even though they were the same company. The other thing that we found that was curious was we looked at Southgate, for example, which is sort of a low-income area, and we compared it to Santa Monica, which drew more high earners. More items in Southgate were under lock and key or had security devices than in Santa Monica,” Martín said. “And this came even though Santa Monica has a higher crime rate for property crimes. So that was curious to us, and it did ire a lot of activists for the poor.”
Watch the full interview above.
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