Bloomberg no paywall: “…In retailers’ eyes it might be their best option, but it’s one that appears to be backfiring. Neil Saunders, managing director of the retail practice at the firm GlobalData, describes the locking up of merch as “a blunt instrument.” Several years into this experiment, the instrument’s outcomes are becoming clear: miserable workers, irritated customers, abandoned shopping carts and more reasons than ever to shop online. The modern American store is designed around self-service, which encourages customers to buy more. If you can’t just grab most of the things you want, the brick-and-mortar retail system as we know it stops working…In general, products that get locked up are those most likely to go missing. But part of the issue with these locked cabinets is that retailers don’t always know if the missing inventory was stolen off a shelf or never made it to the shelf to begin with, says Jennifer Fagan, a retail industry analyst at consulting firm EY. If the merchandise was purloined, little is usually known about the perpetrator, or their intentions—an organized resale theft ring is hardly the only potential culprit. All of this is “an assumption,” Fagan says. “Retailers don’t have the data to give you that exact answer.” This is why, in part, any particular store’s choices about what to lock up can seem completely arbitrary. Most products that end up behind plastic are health, beauty, electronics or cleaning products—but not all health, beauty, electronics or cleaning products. In a Target I visited, the replacement heads for electric toothbrushes were encased, but regular toothbrushes weren’t. Bulk packs of Rogaine selling for $72 were on regular shelves next to $6 deodorant that you couldn’t touch. Pricey toys, home-improvement products and name-brand printer ink cartridges roamed free, but the $1.99 plastic bath loofahs had been imprisoned. Name-brand products are known to be a larger theft risk because they’re more valuable to resellers, Fagan says, but beyond that, what to lock up tends to be guesswork for retailers…”