... and if they are profiling customers, the settlements are going to make their shrinkage losses look like pocket change
In terms of profiling - some folks are sick of theft - so the sentiment change if they start taking a harder line on theft may be smaller than you think. The profiling is easy. Pushing a shopping cart past the registers and out the front door without paying.
A local place cracked down majorly on this - I think it's been good for the business. The locked up merchandise is an absolute mess to deal with though - they don't have enough staff and so much is locked up so you spend a lot of time waiting to get stuff. I've started going to another location of this one store that is in an area much less impacted by retail theft - it is night and day just in atmosphere and accessibility.
A 2024 version would have less paper and more robotics, but the retail concept in the US worked quite successfully for decades. Treated staff decently as well…
If they do just hand over the merchandise there's a decent chance that loss prevention personnel are watching you all the way to checkout.
I don't know, that doesn't match my experience, unless the store employees are really darn good at being discrete.
Same for someone who wants to pick up $500 tool, can't produce a wallet, cash, or credit card.
Most people do not get handed the item from the lock case. I believe it's policy at most stores, the item goes to the front where the person requesting the item asks for it at the register.
People like you or I may be handed items from the lock case, but that's because we look trustworthy to the employees. (Wearing nice clothes, hair kept tidy, etc)
I can tell you've never met me.
An argument against incarceration is that it might turn minor criminals into hardened criminals.
Maybe transporting undesirables to a continent inhabited by cockatoos wasn't the full shilling?
An uncomfortable truth about transportation is that while there were hardened criminal types sent over, the great demand was for skills .. the convicts sent were largely desired - stonecutters, wood workers, draftspeople were needed to build a new world and those early Colonial megaliths didn't erect themselves.
The majority of convicts worked without chains or imprisonment, which allowed political prisoners such as the Fennians to make with The Great Escape: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalpa_rescue
Abel Magwitch was quite the benefactor after all.
... which is still one step ahead of the battery area. Where there's no button, and when you do flag down an employee, they tell you that you have to go to customer service, because they have a key, wait in line there behind returns, lottery tickets, cigarette sales, to have them walk with you to the battery area, you point out what you want, and then they take it to a register that you then have to go through that register, regardless of the line, if you were still shopping.
It's ... fucking dystopian. And I don't live in an economically challenged area.
Sounds like you do. The stores are losing sales, why else would they do that?