As Retail Retell pointed out a few pictures back, it looks like someone messed up when installing the hardware sign (something that's all too common with Banner Fred Meyers, and I guess is going to happen in the Artisan era too). The text looks way too low on the sign! Comparing it to other signs of this style, it's pretty clear that the slatted piece was installed too high on the hanger, and it's possible that the lettering was installed too low on the hanger piece too (but I can't tell for sure). And it doesn't help that this is another part of the store where there's tons of extra merchandise on top of the shelves -- looks like this store had a massive overstock of plastic storage bins; I wonder if people had given up on their lockdown-induced home organizing by early 2021!
That's interesting that what appears to be flashlights are kept in a locked glass case. I'm not sure if I've ever seen that before. Is it common for retailers to lock up flashlights in your area?
ReplyDeleteIt looks like on the right side, some tools are kept in a locked case as well. Seeing tools in a locked case is less surprising. The Midtown (next to downtown) Sears in Houston had most of it's tools in locked cases when it was still around and I think the N. Shepherd Sears, another former urban Houston Sears, had some tools (though not nearly as many as the Midtown one) behind a locked door.
It seems like around here, it's super common for all sorts of random things to be locked up like this! Walmart and Fred Meyer are the worst offenders, but everyone does it... Target, Safeway, QFC, even Walgreens (which was one of the first around here). As you can see here, it's not always obviously high-value items, and it's also not limited to stores you'd expect to have a theft problem (this one is in an upper-middle-class suburb). It seems like retailers are leaning on locked cases like this (or, alternatively, the Costco solution of having cards to bring to the checkout counter instead of actual merchandise on the shelves) to be the solution to all of their theft problems, but the issue there is that the same chains have cut staffing to the bare minimum (even pre-COVID), so it's almost impossible to get someone to actually get items out of the locked cases for you! I have to wonder if they're really saving enough from reduced theft to make up for the lost sales as people get frustrated and just order their stuff from Amazon.
DeleteOh, I wasn't meaning to imply they messed up installing it, I just assumed that was part of Artisan's crazy design 😅
ReplyDeleteHa, could be! But I'm so used to Fred Meyer's contractors screwing up decor installation that that explanation seemed all too plausible to me...
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