Damn, I was just looking to post a rant about this because a couple of stores near me started up with this shit in the last few weeks and I was seething over it because of how reactionary and sad it is. One store locked up entire aisles of household goods, toiletries, and medicine. The other just has a couple of brands of laundry detergents, cleaners, and pills locked behind glass. Now I require a personal shopper to come along with me to open up multiple cabinets so I can buy laundry detergent, mouthwash, deodorant, razors, and allergy meds. What if I need to look at labels? What if I decide I don't want something? Do I need to flag several employees to open each of the cages? It's not like these places are (or will be) staffed with enough people for there to be constant coverage of these cordoned off areas.

Best of all, both stores that did this by me are all-self-checkout deals with maybe one manned register, so any enterprising person could still simply pocket whatever they want after freeing it from its cage. This is in the US btw, in a "progressive" northeast city and state.

So glad these chains pushed out all the smaller, locally-owned competition so there's nowhere else to go unless you waste time shopping around for stores outside your neighborhood that don't deserve to be burned to the ground for this type of garbage, and go out of your way to get to them. So happy to live in a city where the few indoor spaces I go these days have become so openly hostile to everyone it makes me want to just order everything online.

I decided not to set foot into these places now, though I'm starting to think it'd be better praxis to go in and waste everyone's time by incessantly reading every label on every product and comparison shopping while they have to stand there the whole time with the cases open. Or get a bunch of items then decide later that I don't want them and leave them on random shelves. Or decide I need to "call" someone to confirm this was the ointment I was supposed to pick up, then read off the ingredients just to be sure.