The newest retail anti-innovation: We'll show you our products, but good luck buying them

We've talked about this before, but I'm really not certain why retail store executives are so insistent on making the basic experience of "shopping" into a consumer-abusing hellscape. Large, ominously-shaped security and cleaning robots wandering the aisles. Shopping carts with video screens flashing advertisements in your face; digital price tags on the shelves so that the back office can update prices on the fly when weather conditions suggest an opportunity for a bit of light gouging. Yes, that's what I want when shopping. I want to be surrounded by suspicious robots, flashing screens, and security cameras that record my facial expressions as I pick each product up so that an "A.I." can analyze whether or not there's still room to raise the price before I snap.

While we're at it, maybe you could dim the overhead lights a bit more, narrow each aisle so that nobody can stop to compare items without creating a blocked-up Suez Canal situation, and instead of having sales maybe you could just have Wasp Days, days when store managers throw a wasps' nest into aisle five just to see what happens?

The trend of locking products up behind glass is another recent retail anti-innovation. It's allegedly to stop shoplifting, and it turns out it's quite good at that because putting things in locked cabinets just stops "shopping" altogether.

Upon discovering that an item they want to buy is in a locked case, less than one in three shoppers (32%) get a store employee to unlock the case, according to a reader survey from Consumer World, a consumer advocacy website. For 55% of respondents, it’s a lost sale, because when a product is locked up, they try to buy it elsewhere. The remaining 13% try to find an alternative product in the same store that is not locked up.

Well, yeah. Is this a surprise? I can't imagine anyone, anywhere is surprised by those results. We've got two competing trends going on here. The first is locking up items like deodorant and toothpaste behind glass so that you can't purchase them without flagging down a store employee to open the case. The second trend is downsizing staff to the point where there's no employee to flag down to begin with. It would take a true rocket scientist to analyze the result of combining Trend 1 with Trend 2, and none of these stores are keen on hiring rocket scientists so they're going to keep going with the plan of "eh, it's probably fine."

It's not fine, of course. I'm not going to spend an extra ten minutes of my day pacing through aisles to hunt down a possibly-imaginary employee who may or may not be on duty in order to buy a $4 item. I'm going to go home and buy it online from an equally terrible consumer-abusing company who will ship it right to my house when I click the little button that says "I want to buy this"—exactly as God intended.

What retail chains such as Target, aka Walmart but Classier, have anti-invented is a more pompous version of the small town general store, the kind where all the products are behind or under a long counter and the vest-wearing proprietor greets you as you come in, takes your list of desired purchases, and fetches them all his-or-her-own-self rather than you having to look for any of it on your own. That's how food and sundries shopping used to work pretty much everywhere, in either brick-and-mortar shops or marketplace stalls, until cities got more and more crowded and there needed to be more and more clerks to serve each customer and eventually someone threw up their hands and invented the now-staple of our modern lives: How about I take a seat here and you get all that damn stuff yourself, eh?

That turned out to be an enormous cost-saving technique, but it only works if you let shoppers actually do it. It takes true capitalist innovation to come up with "what if we put it all behind the counter, then fire anyone who has the key." That's the kind of innovation you get from executive teams that have never once shopped at their own stores and don't intend to start now. That's the kind of innovation you get when the executive team truly despises their fellow human beings and spend their days dreaming of a new future era when they won't have to sell soup or bananas or almost-expired meat to anyone, they'll become a pure "brand" company and spend every day doing interviews about Being Innovative.

Internet shopping is already a superior experience to the in-person version, at least when it comes to nonperishables. If you're losing 2/3 of your remaining customers due to a locked door between them and your products, and that seems like a good idea to the executive team, then shoplifters must really have been robbing the place blind—but there's still not much evidence that such thefts are even happening at the scale industry lobbyists are insisting on. That may make all of this just another experiment to suss out how much customers can be poked and abused before they give up on a store altogether.

I wonder if anyone in the home offices realizes just how hostile it feels, as a customer, to have a store tell you you're not good enough to pick that deodorant or ibuprofen off the shelf yourself. I ... don't think they do.

“It’s become routine to discover entire aisles transformed into untouchable product galleries armored in plexiglass,” Amanda Mull wrote about locked cases in Bloomberg in August. “The whole thing has a whiﬀ of pawnshop, which might actually be unfair to pawnshops.”

Since we are all charitable types here, we can give some free advice to these fabulously overpaid executives that will solve their damn problems. Want to display your products without letting consumers touch them, therefore preventing theft? Put all of that crap behind a long counter, have "clerks" who serve customers and fetch each product, boom. You're done. It'll be like a scene from the old west or from Little House on the Prairie, TV version, except the clerks will have worse healthcare. I expect shoppers will still buy those products if the person whose job it is to hand it to them is standing right there and can at least feign being happy to do it; it will, unfortunately, require hiring A Human.

Or not. Here are some other ways you could solve the supposed problem you claim you're solving without treating your entire customer base like would-be criminals:

What if you kept the glass doors, but left them unlocked and instead installed cameras that secretly took a mugshot whenever the door was opened? That would satisfy the innate corporate need to surveil your customers, and you could wire it up to facial recognition software to see who was opening that door more than a reasonable number of times per month. If a particular someone opened the Deodorant Door more than X times a month an alarm would go off and a loud robotic voice would blare: "Just how much deodorant do you go through a month, buddy? You should probably see a doctor about that."

See there? You still get your necessary customer abuse, and in fact what you could do is the same thing as you've done with store exit alarms—make 'em go off randomly when a customer who's done absolutely nothing wrong shows up, just to keep everyone on their toes and remind them that you can call the cops on anyone for any reason you want to, that's just the risk shoppers are agreeing to take when they come to Store Brand Here.

Or, fine, you could make the robots do the work. Instead of hiring actual human beings to do the "hand product to shopper" step, you could purchase fabulously expensive industrial robots to do the same action. You wouldn't have to pay a human employee; you would, however, get to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year attempting to keep that damn robot functioning.

The good thing about that plan? There's a very good risk of not just irritating customers, but outright injuring them. Anytime you put a robot with limbs in any environment that also includes untrained humans who also have limbs, you stand a very, very good chance of somebody getting their arm ripped off. Sure, your shoppers might be annoyed at the random alarms that go off one in ten times they exit your store, but think how pissed off they'll be when the Deodorant Robot rips their arm off, medics have to wheel them out of the store on a stretcher, and when the stretcher hits the store exit the shoplifter alarm still goes off because now it thinks the customer is trying to leave the store without paying for their own torn-off arm. It's the Holy Grail of consumer abuse.

There is, of course, a simpler solution here. It might even work.

Just don't let anyone into your stores, ever. Lock the doors. Instead of shopping carts, give your customers a phone app that allows them to place their entire order online. Have clerks and/or arm-ripping robots go through the store, plucking items off the shelves and bagging them. When the customer drives up, hand them the bags through a service window, take their payment and tell them to have a nice mostly robot-free day.

There you go, you've just invented the old timey general store in all its glory, and nobody has to know that inside the building a violent and bloody battle has broken out between the arm-ripping robots and the five remaining store employees. Just turn the cameras back off and nobody will see a thing.