Shopping carts are seen near the Walmart store in Williston. Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images
- Many retailers attribute rampant product losses to widespread shoplifting.
- Some large chains have stored products behind locks to prevent shoplifting.
- Now one of them is considering completely removing branded products from the range.
Get ready to see more store brand knockoffs at your local supermarket.
Some retailers say shoplifting has become so bad that they are removing branded items from their shelves and instead offering private label items with lower resale value.
At Giant Food, a supermarket chain with 165 stores in the D.C. area and surrounding states, at least one struggling store has decided to sell products that are at higher risk of theft — things like Tide laundry detergent, Dove soap and Pantene shampoo sealed boxes or they were removed from shelves entirely, the Washington Post reported. As an alternative, cheaper own brands are offered.
“I don’t want to do this,” Giant President Ira Kress told the Post. Kress previously called shrinkage (loss of product due to theft, damage or loss) a “spiral problem” and said in July that thefts at Giant stores had increased five to 10-fold in recent years.
Nationwide chains like Home Depot, Target, Dollar Tree and Ulta are among those that said in recent earnings releases that shrinkage was a problem. Target executives told investors earlier this year that the company expects to lose $500 million in profits this year due to a lack of inventory caused by theft and organized retail crime, Insider previously reported.
“But the reality is that Tide is not a profitable item in this business,” Kress told the Post. “In many cases, people put the product in storage and within two hours it is gone. So it’s not on the shelf anyway.”
Several leading chains stored items in locked boxes, requiring a store employee to unlock them. But anti-theft measures can have an unintended consequence: They are so annoying that they scare away paying customers.
One shopper previously told Insider that the lockers have “gone from somewhat inconvenient to beyond inconvenient.”
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