New York-area shoppers who need employee assistance to get products that have been locked up because of soaring retail theft are being forced to wait as long as 40 minutes for their goods, according to a report.
Reporters from the investigative outlet Inside Edition visited five Targets, five Walmarts and five CVS stores across New York and New Jersey to see how long it took to receive items set behind lock and key after pressing the stores respective help buttons.
A Walmart in New Jersey made Inside’s investigators wait the longest, even after calling for assistance three times to snag locked-up baby formula.
It took 15 minutes for a store employee to the rescue, and a manager apologized for the lengthy wait time, Inside Edition reported.
In another aisle at the NJ Walmart store, the wait for an electric toothbrush was a staggering 24 minutes. The Inside team waited a staggering 40 minutes in total to pick up just three items, per the outlet.
Inside journalist Lisa Guerrero stepped into a Target in Manhattan, and appeared shocked by how many things were locked behind product cases as footage showed a handful of customers waiting for assistance.
“They locked up the underwear,” Guerrero said in surprise, “and the socks.”
“Everything’s locked up,” she said in an aisle where a stockpile of toothpaste was set behind glass casing.
Just outside of the NYC Target, a shopper told Inside that he “ended up waiting about 13 to 14 minutes, and then I just kind gave up,” while another woman called the barricades “discouraging.”
Again Guerrero and her team had to ask for assistance three times — and wait seven minutes — before a Target staffer showed up.
“And then their key didn’t even work,” Guerrero said, who had to wait even longer for the staffer to fetch the correct key before she could fetch a tube of toothpaste of the shelf.
In another aisle stocked with vitamins, the journalist said she waited 10.5 minutes for an employee to unlock the anti-theft barrier.
Waiting on assistance added nearly 20 minutes of time to Guerrero’s shopping trip at this Target outpost.
The Post has sought comment from Walmart and Target.
Meanwhile, a CVS in Manhattan had the shortest wait time of all the stores the Inside team visited by far. Inside investigators had to wait a very manageable 30 seconds to retrieve body wash, and 30 seconds for razors.
The barricades exemplify how much the shoplifting crisis has been plaguing the nation, forcing retailers to stash increasingly more items away under heavy lock and key to avoid losing revenue.
Crime-battered Target said earlier this year that expected to suffer as much as a $1.3 billion hit to its bottom line because of “theft and organized crime.”
The Minneapolis-based chain said its profit will be squeezed by “$500 million more than what we saw last year” – when the company lost as much as $800 million from “inventory shrink.”
“While there are many potential sources of inventory shrink, theft and organized retail crime are increasingly important drivers of the issue,” the company said. “We are making significant investments in strategies to prevent this from happening in our stores.”
Inventory shrink is an industry term that refers to fewer products being on its shelves than what’s reported in its inventory catalog.
Last summer, even a $3.99 can of cheap meat Spam was locked up, with Post reporters finding cases of lousy tins of tuna at half the price getting the same treatment at one of the chain’s stores in Penn Station under Madison Square Garden this past June.
At the time, The Post visited a handful of shops in the Big Apple on Friday to find a slew of low-priced items — including Dawn dishwashing liquid ($2.19), Vaseline lip balm ($2.79), kids toothbrushes ($3.99), Cadbury chocolate ($3.99) and the $1.79 can of tuna — locked in cabinets that require customers to ring a bell and then wait for employees to eventually get them.
Experts have blamed rising cases of rampant theft on lax policies — including the passage of Prop 47 in California, which reduced theft from a potential felony to a misdemeanor — as well as calls to defund the police in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, which resulted in a mass exodus of cops nationwide.
The atmosphere has made retail-laden cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago a “shoplifter’s paradise.”
According to the Chicago Police Department, thefts are up 25% to-date year over year. Robberies are up 11% — perhaps a reason Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said he wants to open city-owned grocery stores.
There’s no nationwide policy on how to deal with shoplifting, which many retailers have tried to combat by implementing these anti-theft cases.
If a theft incident still does occur, many employers have encouraged staffers to do nothing at all in an effort to keep them out of harm’s way.
Just last month 49-year-old Michael Jacobs, a CVS operations manager in Mesa, Ariz., was killed on the job by Jared Sevey, 39, who was suspected of shoplifting, police say.
And in April, a 26-year-old Home Depot employee was fatally shot after confronting a woman attempting to steal from the home improvement retailer’s Pleasanton store, located in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Just days earlier, a pregnant shoplifter at a Walgreens in Nashville was shot by a staffer following a confrontation over stolen merchandise that resulted in an exchange of Mace and bullets.
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