That's about what I expected, but I've been phrophecizing the collapse of the app economy for like a decade at this point and it seems almost too good to be true.
In the last drug store I worked in, about 3 years ago, before I quit they went through the makeup department and put hanger locks on every single item in the department. A massive about of extra effort for the already laborious task of stocking that section.
The result? Makeup continues to get stolen, but now no one buys any either, because the department never gets restocked. It's too time consuming. So the section always looks barren. Everybody just goes to sephora instead.
I could have told them this, but who would listen to some girl with no business degree to wave around?
The fifteen minute city concept is threatening to the right, so like with so many terms they are diluting their meaning to blunt their effect. They did this with "urban", they are doing it now with the term "woke", it's a linguistic sabotage.
I worked in retail for years right up through the pandemic, in grocery and drug stores, and it's really illuminating to experience that environment when you've already been inoculated against these taking points. Because there has been no increase in shoplifting.
Shoplifting has always been easy and commonplace, it happens every single day and it always has. The only thing that has changed is that people who work these jobs are being fed this narrative of a shoplifting crime wave, and have become more paranoid and hostile as a response.
In response to this cultural pressure, this propaganda effort to obscure and deflect awareness of drastically plunging buying power and general impoverishment, petty managers seeking a sense of control over perceived attacks on "their stores" (nonsense serf logic) are chaining everything to the floor. And this of course only worsens their declining sales, because why bother even trying to buy something in the store if you're doing to do so legitimately if you have to ask someone to get it for you? You might as well have it delivered tomorrow by Amazon!
@Saoirse
@hexbear.net