You go in a store and see that the product that you want to buy is locked up. What do you do?
I won’t buy it at that store. I’ll buy it in a store where they don’t treat customers like criminals. Maybe I will buy a different brand that isn’t locked up if that will work for me. Some folks will leave the store and purchase the desired item online.
Locking up merchandise is meant to reduce theft but it also reduces sales. It introduces an atmosphere of ill will with customers. It says we don’t mind inconveniencing you and making you feel like you are worthy of being under suspicion in our store.
One of the most effective ways to reduce theft is to hire, train, and pay enough human employeees both to help customers and to reduce environments that make it easy to steal. But paying workers costs money. Reducing labor costs is one of the first things that big companies do these days.
Putting barriers between what you are offering and the people who actually want it is counterproductive.
Consider the methods chosen by the Mall in Columbia to restrict teens and basically pre-criminalize them. I’m sure there are some folks that consider that justifiable. I know plenty, though, who find it abhorrent and just don’t shop at the mall anymore. Not just teens - - adults who want nothing to do with policies that treat young people like pests and inconveniences.
When you implement “solutions” that drive away people who legitimately want to patronize your establishment, that’s not a solution.
Can you guess what I think about paid parking at the Mall? Yup:
Putting barriers between what you are offering and the people who actually want it is counterproductive.
And another thing.
Not everyone who has mobility issues has a handicapped hang tag for their car. There are far more people than you realize who just can’t walk extended distances. It could be due to age, or injury, or breathing difficulties. Before my doctor got my asthma under control a shopping trip was possible for me only if I got the closest space to the door.
If I couldn’t, I went home.
Now the Mall says that people like that should pay extra. Strangely enough, people who have any variety of mobility issues aren’t exactly rolling in money.
Well maybe the Mall just isn’t for you, I can imagine someone saying. Well then, who is it for?
Your friendly neighborhood retailers do not care if you are inconvenienced, feel criminalized, must navigate extra barriers, and have to pay more to do it, too.
Businesses do have challenges and it makes sense to want to address them. But implementing policies that drive people and sales away are not solutions. They don’t work and they create bigger problems than the ones they were meant to fix.
Effective solutions are far more creative and far more human: design and maintain environments that make it easy for customers to be good customers. The big companies would find them too expensive.
But driving away the very people you depend on is so much more expensive.
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