Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/11/failing-dollar-stores-blame-shoplifters-no-ones-buying-it-anymore.html
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When I invested in stocks, I made some good money on Family Dollar. While the stores are kind of funky, they had a sophisticated JIT inventory system and used the cash register to control it all. Walmart poached several of their people away to start up their online business. But that was many years ago.
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Not even Wall Street believes this weak cover story for executive incompetence anymore. The real issue is usually C-suite managers opening way too many locations to demonstrate a number-go-up “growth mindset”, only to end up cannibalising regional sales and also increasing headcount, rent costs, and overhead.
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I personally feel like if I was desperate enough to steal something it would be from one of the junk stores.
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This is remarkable in the USA? Every British supermarket has worked this way since barcode scanning was introduced in the 1980s.
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It’s worth reposting this:
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I don’t see how you can have no one working there, have such marked up goods, put in key poor areas that are dependent on your 10 use bottle of Tide, and still not make money. That’s some really bad business.
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I mean, where shoplifting is an issue for retailers, it’s mostly the organized rings that come in and take out thousands of dollars of goods for resale online. Individuals lifting a few goods for their own use, that’s always happened and that’s built into the pricing. The organized groups do see to be a new phenomenon - but they’re not targeting Family Dollar. They’re stealing electronics from Best Buy. A couple months ago, there was a group that hit Ulta Beauty pretty hard. Expensive stuff that’s easy to resell. Not going after the stuff that lines the shelves of the dollar stores.
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I fully agree with @fredtal about Family Dollar stores being “kind of funky”. I remember visiting one while travelling and got the whole “what did I just step into” feeling.
99Cents Only used to be a good store for cheap knockoff items like Qtips etc, but when they changed their business model to increase prices to $1.99 and up, it suddenly became cheaper to buy the real thing at Walmart etc. They seemed to do a decent bit of business, but never had enough cashiers.
Bottom line is they were ‘shoplifted’ by the venture capitalists that bought the companies, then completely distroyed them.
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You should have visited one back in the '80s when they were still trying to compete with such illustrious stores as Roses or Zayre. Even as a young teen I remember then feeling seedy - dingy and run down. They either build them that way or that was just my hometown in general.
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i’ve never worked at a place with it. so yes? granted ive never worked for a big chain, but just in time inventory is labor intensive.
sure you scan things when you sell; that’s the easy part. but you also have to scan everything coming in too. you get shorted on orders more than you’d think ( or things are damaged ), and you have to scan and keep up with shrink: expired, sampled, shoplifted, or simply lost items.
if you’re off, and you’re not looking, the differences are going to add up. so you also need to be doing frequent inventories.
it’s not “free” - so sometimes it’s simpler to just have good buyers keeping track of what’s hot and what’s not. and deal with a little slop of sometimes having too much, and sometimes too little
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FTFY.
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An interesting (to me) result of Dollar Tree and Family Dollar being owned by the same company now is that the local Family Dollar was just renovated to be a two in one store where one half is Family Dollar (and everything really is a dollar) and the other half is Dollar Tree (where prices are above a dollar, but still low).
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I could tell you a largely true story from maybe 30-40 years ago, about old man Sam Walton, Proctor & Gamble, stock management systems, massive online databases (and the hardware engines that power them) and how Walmart engineered JIT deliveries from suppliers by letting them access Walmart stock mgt systems … and Walmart ended up needing much less warehouse and distribution capacity (especially the human capacity engaged in placing orders).
But the story itself is far too long.
And it is a little known fact that Sainsburys adopted barcodes primarily to shorten queues at checkouts. That was the business case - which included POS terminals to scan them. They realised all the stock mgt benefits after the fact.
(I may have referenced this once or twice before, here. I guess whenever the barcode/JIT retail supply chain topic comes up.)
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Shoplifters? Do you know how many items you have to shoplift at $1 a piece to make any real difference? Like many carts full at a time.
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I always just assumed stores like that were just money laundering operations.
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It doesn’t help that in small towns I often see a Family Dollar, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General all right next to each other.
@Amstrad Thanks, that explains half of it!
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This Washington Post article
Alarm over bare store shelves deflects attention from complex problems
describes the usual anecdotes.
When my colleagues looked into this, the best numbers they found came from a Capital One Shopping analysis of retail data. That said retailers in D.C. lost about $108 million in annual revenue to theft, which is 26.3 percent less than the national average of retail theft per capita.
To be clear, none of this is okay. Not for District residents hoping to buy baby formula or cereal on their way home, and not for the dwindling numbers of workers left helpless and without backup, as was the case in that viral video of garbage-bag bandits loading up at a Bethesda CVS this year.
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I wrote about it more than a decade ago, when the Tide laundry detergent jugs in my Capitol Hill CVS started sporting anti-theft tags on their handles and manager Randy Nkrumah told me “I’ve never seen it like this before, only in the last few months.”
[ Thieves turn laundry detergent into ‘liquid gold’ ]
It was 2012, and the police said stolen Tide was being sold out of car trunks on the street. “Liquid gold,” they called it.
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Make it hard to get at the usual store and then sell at a lower price.
My zaidie ran a junkyard and his comment was “what you get for free you can afford to sell a little cheaper!”
