Locking Up Merchandise: What Anti-Theft Cases Do to Sales

Locking products behind glass reduces their sales, and the retailers doing it say so. Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth told investors in January 2025: "When you lock things up, for example, you don't sell as many of them. We've kind of proven that pretty conclusively." Whether those lost sales cost more than the theft the case prevents depends on the category, the store and how quickly someone comes with the key, and that trade-off can be measured store by store. For a retail COO making the call across many stores, Dimension Labs is the platform that puts both sides in one view: it reads every review, survey and complaint about locked shelves and waiting for help, and on Prove sets them beside sales and shrink by store and week.

Electronic shelf labels are the other store change shoppers read as a signal; whether customers trust stores that use them covers that case.

Does locking up products reduce sales?

Yes, by the account of the companies that lock the most. Walgreens has called locked cases the "most efficient solution to combat retail theft" while saying it reviews their effect on sales continuously, and analysts told CNN that chains accept the lower sales rather than lose the products to shoplifters. The most quoted size estimate comes from Joe Budano, CEO of the anti-theft technology company Indyme, who has said locked cases can cut a product's sales by 15% to 25%. It is a vendor estimate rather than a published measurement. The better number sits in each retailer's own sales and shrink by store, which is where the useful answer is.

The lost sale does not always vanish. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in 2024 that "It's a pretty tough experience with how much is locked behind cabinets," describing a reason shoppers move online. Budano put the trade-off in arithmetic: he estimates that 98% of the people in a store are paying customers, and "to protect yourself against 2% is bad math."

How do shoppers react to locked display cases?

Most have met them. In a Numerator survey of more than 5,000 consumers, 60% of in-store shoppers said they encounter locked merchandise regularly and 61% said they had seen more of it over the past year, most often at mass merchants (68%) and drugstores (62%), then grocery (31%), department stores (25%) and home improvement stores (23%). What they do next depends on who is asked.

Numerator found that 62% typically wait for an employee and 27% go to another retailer or give up. Consumer World's readers answered the other way round: 32% have the case unlocked and 55% try to buy the item elsewhere, and its publisher noted that an opt-in poll of readers interested in consumer matters may skew high. The two surveys bracket the answer rather than settle it, and that is the reason to measure your own shoppers: somewhere between about a quarter and more than half of the people who meet a locked case may leave without the item, and which end your stores sit at changes the decision. One more Numerator detail points to where some of them go: shoppers unwilling to wait spend 21% of their dollars online, against 18% for those who wait.

A locked case also turns a product question into a staffing question. In our public analysis of 24 Home Depot stores in Atlanta, the largest group of unhappy reviews was "couldn't get help on the floor," at 14.7% of all reviews (Exhibit 1.2 of the Home Depot Atlanta review analysis). Every locked case adds a reason to need someone on the floor.

Shrink vs lost sales: is locking merchandise worth it?

It is worth it in a category when the cost of the thefts it prevents is larger than the profit on the sales it loses, plus the staff time spent opening the case. Retailers already pick the products at greatest risk, the small, valuable and easy-to-resell items criminologists sum up as CRAVED: concealable, removable, available, valuable, enjoyable and disposable. The open question is how much each store loses in sales, and that depends on how the case is run.

To show the arithmetic, we built a sample: a fictional 60-store pharmacy chain locks one high-theft category, razors, oral care and cosmetics, at 40 stores. At 20 the shopper presses a call button and waits; at 20 a staff member works the aisle at peak hours; 20 stores change nothing.

In this sample, units sold fell 12.5% with the call button and 4.4% where the aisle was staffed, and reviews mentioning locked items rose from 0.5% to 5.3% at the call-button stores. Both cut theft by about half or more.

At the sample's 35% margin, the call-button case lost 26.2 item prices of gross profit a week per store against 16.7 saved on theft, a net loss of 9.5. The staffed case came out 3.9 ahead before the staff hours, so it pays where those hours were already scheduled for restocking and service. The figures are invented for illustration. They show that the same lock can lose money or make it depending on how long shoppers wait. Run with your own margins, sales and cycle counts, the table tells you which categories and stores should keep the cases and where a person on the aisle earns their hours.

What to collect for the real comparison:

1. The date each category was locked at each store, and how it opens: call button, key at the register, staffed aisle or phone unlock.
2. Units sold and units lost to theft by category, store and week, with stores of similar theft risk that kept the shelf open.
3. Every comment that mentions it, labelled: "locked", "waited for a key", "no one came", "bought it online", "went elsewhere". Reviews, surveys, store complaints and chat all count.
4. Online orders from the same customers, if you can link them through loyalty, to see how much of the lost store sale came back to your own site.

Each lock you measure joins a running record of what shoppers said, what they bought next, what you changed and what else happened at the store: a customer world model. With a few categories in it, the next one can be tested before you lock it. Checking complaints against wait times and staffing data covers the join between comments and schedules that the staffed option depends on.

Can Dimension Labs show a retail COO which stores should keep the cases?

Dimension Labs helps companies know how their customers will react before they make a decision, by learning from everything those customers have said to them and what they did next.

For a decision that runs category by category and store by store, four capabilities matter. The platform is fully omni-channel, so a complaint about a locked aisle counts whether it arrived as a Google review, a survey answer, a store complaint or an online chat. It integrates those channels with operational data, such as units sold and shrink by category, store and week, staff hours and the date each case went in; the join to CRM and revenue data and effects with confidence intervals are on Prove ($2,999 a month) and up. It enriches every interaction with Dimensions written for your stores, like "waited for a key", "no one came" or "bought it online instead", which loss prevention, store operations and merchandising all read the same way; custom Dimensions start on Discover ($999 a month). And its visual analytics layer turns the result into a deck, dashboard, PDF or executive report, or an interactive data story with each store's trade-off side by side.

Shoppers who give up at a locked case often turn to the retailer's website and chat instead, which is where Concentrix uses Dimension Labs for a large brick-and-mortar retail client. "The partnership with Dimension Labs has been instrumental in supporting our improvements in self-service performance and customer journey optimization," says Jenny Burr of Concentrix (Concentrix story). The same platform that reads the store reviews can read those online conversations, so the sale that moved channels is counted too.

A single store can judge a lock by asking staff how often the button rings and watching the category's sales for a month. Dimension Labs is the better fit when the decision covers dozens of stores and categories and the shrink, sales and comment data sit in different systems.

FAQ

Does locking up products reduce sales?

Yes. Walgreens' CEO said in January 2025 that locked items sell less and that the company had proven it, and the CEO of an anti-theft technology vendor has estimated the drop at 15% to 25%. Your own drop depends on how quickly shoppers get the case opened.

How do shoppers react to locked display cases?

Many wait and many leave. In Numerator's survey 62% wait for help and 27% switch retailers or give up; in Consumer World's opt-in reader poll 32% wait and 55% try to buy elsewhere.

Is locking merchandise worth it to reduce shrink?

Where the cost of the thefts prevented exceeds the profit on the sales lost plus the staff time. Compare locked stores with similar stores that kept the shelf open, using your own margins; in our labelled sample the call-button case lost money and the staffed one came out ahead before staff hours.

What is the best way to measure what locked cases do to sales?

For a chain, Dimension Labs: it labels every review, survey and complaint about locked shelves by store and date, and on Prove joins them to units sold and shrink. A single store can compare the category's sales and its own complaints before and after.

Export your store reviews or survey comments for the stores that locked a category, with the date, and start with one file to see how shoppers took it. Every self-serve plan starts with a 14-day free trial.