I couldn't help while reading this thinking 'Security is in charge of Customer Experience'. Obviously theft is a serious problem for the likes of retail -- and shoplifting is something that isn't 100% preventable. You can reduce it, but you can't stop it. And every step you take to reduce it risks alienating customers.
For example, we've all encountered those silly alarm systems at the doors. As I've never been a shoplifter, I've never had those go off on me except in error. When I worked at CompUSA for 5 years, we had a greeter at the door who told me "they've never once, in 15 years, caught a shoplifter". They went off several times a day, so the only people being stopped at the door were people who had purchased their goods being treated like a shoplifter.
I'm assuming this system will work a lot better than the old, but if I got my tool home and it simply didn't work, I'd be extremely frustrated -- especially if I could have avoided both drives to the retail store and had the product delivered tomorrow, instead.
The alternative is to turn the whole thing upside down. Change the way shopping is done so that shoplifting doesn't work. I fill a cart, walk through the gate out the door and receive a total, passing my card/phone over a sensor to pay. Of course, this means it's on Home Depot to get it right and I'm sure there will be ways to defeat the system. If they fail to ring up an item because it's not detected in the cart, I'm not sure if they have legal recourse at that point, but it also serves to motivate them to make the system a lot more reliable than the current ones are. And you stop treating your customers like shoplifters :)
If Home Depot could somehow extend this anti-theft protection to the original purchaser, that would be a huge positive to customer experience. Tool theft at job sites is a massive problem, especially because most workers are responsible for providing their own tools.
i wrench in a shop all day long, and let me tell you what works. Pink tools.
My pocket knife is hot pink, my socket wrenches are dipped pink, and most of my powertools have a flair of pink somewhere from a can of Krylon. Pink is natures danger color for the average nail swatter pounding monster energy and fried cake from the 7-11 at 4 AM. my job boxes are covered in unicorn stickers and rainbows.
I used to do a lot of product demos that involved network equipment. All the patch cables I carried were either pink or purple. They were never confused with customer cables, and I do not ever recall one of them being stolen.
And not just the tools, also the consumables. Endmills and such grow little legs as soon as they're out of the central depot. And that stuff really adds up.
My Makita batteries have an anti-theft feature built-in that offers a way to disable the battery after a certain date or number of hours or days. You have to plug the battery back into a special terminal to "recharge" the day or hour timer or to set a new lockout with a PIN. It comes with warning stickers you can put on your batteries. The system is mostly just meant to prevent workers from borrowing equipment for weekend side jobs or keeping batteries after the job is finished. It doesn't actually stop someone from stealing them (or even the tool the battery goes with) but hopefully they read the sticker and realize that it's not worth stealing what will soon be a worthless battery. I've never used this feature but it's a neat system. Sometimes the tools themselves have anti-theft tags inside that will set off sensors but I don't know if anyone actually uses that outside of the store you bought the tool from.
I have read about the coming cryptographically signed video cameras to prevent deep fakes. Now we have have signed battery packs. I can't wait to solder in mod-chips into my batteries like the good old days of game consoles.
It has become a lot of fun to strip DRM from anything I own. This feeling of freedom that I have that most consumers don't is exhilarating and sad at the same time.
We are still in the "good old days" where we can still choose to live most of life without DRM but I know the end will be coming one day.
I guess I can prolong it by maintaining my good makita tools, keep my N64 in tip top shape and take good care of whatever else I think will be DRM'ed in the future.
I find this line of reasoning weak for one reason.
Things want to be as simple as they can be. DRM adds cost and complexity, it will _always_ be fighting an uphill battle. An electric drill is just an electric motor + chuck, MOSFET + pot, and a battery. Anything added on top of that has to justify itself.
Take a look at the printer industry, for example. You can buy the cartridge cartel inkjet printers, but most people already know that a laserjet is way more reliable -- because it's so simple.
I think we are in agreement just coming at the argument from different angles.
Yes "things want to be as simple as they can be"...so when something dumb like DRM is bolted onto it, you point allows us strip it out that much easier. I believe that one day the design of an item will put DRM first and function second such that the item itself will be secondary to the DRM. I don't know what form this will take but I feel that it is coming. That is why I discussed maintaining my old equipment as long as possible to stall this inevitable day as long as possible.
>Take a look at the printer industry, for example. You can buy the cartridge cartel inkjet printers, but most people already know that a laserjet is way more reliable -- because it's so simple.
I'd argue that you are conflating two different things: Reliability with freedom(lack of DRM).
Laser printers are more reliable not due to the DRM but due to the technology itself.
If you wanna look at it from another POV: Laser printers suffer from cartridge lockout chips that count number of pages printed, the yellow dots printed on sheets that allow the government to trace a printed document back to a specific printer and now the encroaching trend of adding spyware to the printer drivers. Does that make Laser printer technology any worse? Nope. But all that DRM is there regardless of how good laser tech is.
"Firmware Error: this Ryobi drill will automatically turn off and stay off until security patch 11.045. Please connect to a stable Internet connection and set up your Home Depot Builders(TM) account to use your drill."
Watch pre-DRM and 'jailbroken' power tools become highly sought after, lol.
Yup. Just watch what happens when the tools reach end-of-life. No more security patches and they will stop working, like all of those early smart TV apps that have been unsupported for years.
You could buy a third-party manufacturer's tools because they're cheaper, but when they can't keep the lights on and they shut off the authentication servers, well you're SOL
Sounds laughable, but I'm already on, I think, 5th such "Product as a Service" contraption, and refused a 6th one because of client's business model been extremely unethical, and borderline fraud:
A WiFi MP3 player with "unlimited music through life" and few paid premium tracks, which the client planned to suddenly switch into not so unlimited, and subscription only in the course of 2-3 years through the power of fine print, and legalese. Bait, and switch.
Stuff like DRMed consumables for water filters, coffee machine capsules, subscription only air fresheners, and DRMed packed fresh food! is already a reality.
And if you don't believe about microchipped, DRMed food, here it is:
Each pack is made of a very, very sturdy piece of plastic, and an NFC chip, and a single use QR code which will invalidate itself after a single online lookup for an unlock key.
User puts this "food cartridge" into the machine, and scans the code. The machine will cut open the cartridge, and cook the stuff inside.
It will of course refuse to cook if your "food subscription" is expired, or if it thinks the NFC chip is fake. Or at least this is how they wanted it to be in their original design proposal.
Whatever engineering company who took them as a client probably managed to tone down their fantasies a bit.
Tesla makes software performance unlocks, K-Cups have DRM on their pods, and your xbox or playstation hardware is subsidized by the license costs on the games you're gonna buy in the same way your printer is cheap because the ink cartridges are expensive.
Only a matter of time before you can buy a $20 cordless drill but the charger requires a $15/mo Battery Conditioning Cloud subscription.
Honest question - where do professional tradesmen buy their tools?
Mechanics (auto, airline) don't normally go to HD or Lowes - they buy from SnapOn, Cromwell, or Mac - all three send salespeople in large box trucks full of tools to work site. And all three offer credit and payment plans. And when tools break, those trucks come by with replacements.
Tool truck these days are for suckers and everyone under 35-40 knows it (everyone over 40 knows it too but fewer of them will admit it). Back in the day the price differential was less and the quality differential was more and a lot of people are stuck int their ways. People will still pay for tool truck convenience when they need to though. Most people have a mix of everything from Harbor Freight to Craigslist/ebay/pawnshop to tool truck to Home Depot to Amazon. Nobody is really buying expensive tools on the regular because that's a lot of money. People will generally buy expensive power tools when they see a good sale or have a specific job to justify it.
The white collar internet loves to blindly fetishize "quality" tools but professionals are always trying to strike a balance because every buck spent on overhead is a buck you're not getting paid and having breadth of tools is often more important than quantity since having the right tool matters a lot more than having a nice tool and if you don't buy nice tools you can afford to have the right tool more often. For secondary "luxury" tools that just make a job faster (like a ratcheting box wrench) many people buy the cheap stuff whereas tools you only use when you really need them (like flare nut wrenches) tend to be higher quality.
I worked for years with Craftsman and Husky (and some Harbor Freight) hand tools. I later splurged for some secondhand SnapOn ratchets. They are unquestionably better and totally worth the difference in price to me. Similar story with Wera screwdrivers being noticeably better than Craftsman.
I still buy some Harbor Freight tools, especially if I only need it for a one-off job, but the higher-end tool names are often genuinely better, not just higher priced.
You never get more than you pay for but you can always get less.
Whether a fancy ratchet is worth it depends a lot on how much you use your impact wrench. People tend to buy high end versions of the tools they use the most. There's plenty of professional roofers who have a $400 nail guns that weigh nothing and a couple clunky old HF framing guns on the truck. An electrician probably has a pawn shop or harbor freight hammer drill. The plumber probably has a nice hammer drill.
But if you're a young guy just getting started in a trade, and you can choose between a cheap socket set plus two dates with your girlfriend, or a premium socket set? 9/10 guys would choose the former.
It's not totally inconceivable that there are Harbor Freight torque wrenches that are initially is on par with a CDI, Precision Instruments (both of whom Snap-On rebrand), or the Tech-Angle with regards to torque accuracy, but good luck ever getting a reputable metrology shop to touch a Harbor Freight torque wrench (or one that isn't American made, for that matter) when it inevitably comes time to do a re-calibration.
If it's manufactured in a western country, it's probably fine, I don't think you see too many like that here in the U.S.
It's usually either American, Taiwanese or Chinese, and a reputable shop like Angle Repair, for example, absolutely will not touch a Chinese torque wrench, and might only ever touch a Taiwanese torque wrench if it's a warrantied item on one of their supported brands, and probably only with some arm twisting on the part of the vendor they're doing warranty work for.
> The white collar internet loves to blindly fetishize "quality" tools
I don't know how much this is fetishizing versus simply having different priorities.
White collar tech people using tools are more likely to be doing so for hobby or recreation. They have spare money and their goal is a maximally enjoyable experience. With those priorities, it makes sense to buy better tools than you could justify economically.
The white collar internet loves to blindly fetishize "quality" tools but professionals are always trying to strike a balance because every buck spent on overhead is a buck you're not getting paid
That certainly wasn't my intention. My last roommate was an auto mechanic, then later a SnapOn dealer. He and the techs at the shops he serviced had massive rolling carts that cost $20k+ filled with another $30k in tools.
Certainly there were some cheaper tools in those carts, but as far as I could tell, they were mostly SnapOn or Mac.
The building trades mostly go to the big box home centers just like the rest of us. In construction, most hand tools aren't high precision and are semi-disposable, so there's no reason to go above prosumer grade.
There are some specialty tools that are sufficiently rare or expensive they'll get at trade-specific supply houses. Plumbers in particular can do the job either with a $5 saw and a bottle of glue or a $500 PEX expansion tool, depending on material.
The exception is something like high-end finish carpentry or furniture-making, which is high-precision, and does reward having professional tools and taking care of them. They have brands like Festool, which are available at specialty retailers.
When I was gutting/rebuilding my kitchen years ago, I had an unexpected water leak. I’d driven a screw into a PEX line while installing cabinet bases (I missed installing one cover plate before I drywalled). I’d done most of the plumbing myself, but didn’t have the PEX expander tool you mention, just because they’re so expensive.
I called my plumber late in the day and he stopped by on the way home from another gig. He didn’t have the tool on him, so instead he spent about 15 minutes forcing the handle of a socket wrench into the PEX so he could manually cram in a connector. It was remarkable, like watching someone tear a phone book in half. PEX is tough as hell.
I can't speak for other trades, but I have enough experience doing carpentry (mostly on the side, but paid) to say that Home Depot/Lowes/Local equivalent building supply stores are where carpenters and general contractors buy their tools, or at least that we're buying the same models that are available at Home Depot regardless of source.
Interesting. In my limited experience with pneumatic tools, SnapOn is much higher quality than the brands available at big box stores. Probably not worth it for typical homeowners, but my old roommate ran a SnapOn truck.
My dad's company was hired to do work inside a facility that made sockets. At the end of the line where the sockets were being prepared for packaging, the sockets would get separated and sent down various lines where they were stamped with brand info like Craftsmen, SnapOn, Husky, etc. They were all the exact same socket. It's not like they ones that passed a 16 point QA went to SnapOn, the ones that only passed 12/16 points were stamped Craftsman, and the ones with lesser scores stamped Husky. They were all identical.
If the sockets were this way, I would also expect that to be the same across the things like wrenches as well. The great thing about SnapOn is that truck. They will show up without the need for you to go somewhere. Their warranty wasn't any different than Craftsman's life time warranty, except you had to find a Sears.
I recently had the opportunity to take apart somebody else's MAC battery-operated impact wrench, and found it was exactly the same as the DeWalt one on my bench. It's just molded in red plastic instead of yellow. The advertised torque rating is slightly higher than the DeWalt, so maybe there's a subtle component difference in the (epoxy-potted) motor control module. I hope the guy didn't pay too much extra for it though.
Anecdotally, I use my Harbor Freight (non-impact) sockets on my impact gun. I've never broken one. I've broken tons of Craftsman sockets with far less force.
I have never once in my life seen SnapOn tools on a job sight.
Kind of beside the point, but you don't really even see pneumatics in construction much anymore. The _only_ pneumatic tool on my current project is my framing nailer. Every single other power tool is electric (mostly battery). Some companies are even making battery powered framing nailers now, and my corded worm drive saw finally broke after 15 years so I think I'll be upgrading to a battery powered saw in the near future. In a few years, I expect I'll be able to frame a house with entirely battery powered tools.
SnapOn is famously desirable and expensive. I think part of this is that there are very few truly "premium" construction tools because, well, they are used in construction. Your drills and saws and the like are expected to get beat up and may need replacing. You may need more tools if you get more workers one day and fewer tools the next. Obviously there is still a range in quality and I'm sure we've all noticed the difference between a good name brand tool and a more budget option, but I think the ceiling is intentionally kinda low.
Small construction tools (drills, portable table saws, angle grinders) is largely done at big box stores, however smaller stores sell a fair amount, plus specialty product, but the bread and butter small tools are big box stores. Quality is the same, and prices are generally lower.
Shop equipment used to be done by trade show, not sure how it works these days.
When tools break and they need them today (because the job needs to be finished today because there isnt time on the schedule next week to go back to this job site, also most customers get upset if you leave their home in a state of disrepair....), they DO go to HD or Lowes.
All the contractors I've had at my house usually have Dewalt electric tools. I think it's a convenience factor, they are already going to Home Depot during their lunch hour anyway to buy whatever small thing they need to finish the job.
Fastenal is one of the places you'll probably see tradesmen buying tools and hardware. They certainly sell stuff that's several notches above what you can get at a big box store (both tools and hardware), and it's geared to be more friendly to those that know what they're doing.
Depends on the tool and the usecase - our contractors always had proper pro-level drills and powertools, but their handtools (especially more consumable ones that get lost during day to days when they're mobile, like screwdrivers and stuff) looked to be from DIY stores.
Well, the guys that built my shed/workshop/mancave had the cheapest big box store power tools and a hammer that looked (and likely was) older than me. I've never seen anyone brandish one of those 36 or 40V batteries either.
There's a whole parallel universe of suppliers out there. Some stuff comes from muggle stores like Home Depot or Lowes because they're ubiquitous or the tools are sufficiently interchangeable or some wizard brand gets stocked there anyway (Klein, for instance).
Good stuff largely comes from wizard stores. They're mostly locally owned or small, regional chains with a few national chains most muggles haven't heard of. Electrical stuff comes from Needco, Rexel, and Graybar where I live. I bought some Klein screwdrivers at a Rexel, because Klein (and maybe Wera) are the last ones making decent screwdrivers generally and cabinet-tip screwdrivers specifically.
They were $9-$10 a piece instead of that much for a set, but they're made right, and they're readily available if you know where to look.
My handheld power tools mostly come from lumber yards or local hardware stores. And I happily pay more for Makita over DeWalt, Milwaukee, Rigid, etc from the box stores. Not looking to start a flame war over who makes better tools, but the Makita stuff is consistently excellent and priced fairly for the quality.
I've probably used a wider variety of routers than any other type of tool, and it's true that you get what you pay for, especially for plunge routers. The plunge action is just smoother and more precise as you go up in price. Bosch also makes a pretty good one, for what it's worth.
Though I build furniture, not houses, I end up shopping at a lot of the same places as carpenters. You consistently see Festool for handheld power tools (and I do own a Domino), Stabila for levels, Freud, Whiteside and/or Amanda for router bits, Freud or Forrest for saw blades, and Tajima for a wide variety of layout and hand tools. Tajima makes an outstanding chalk line and the nicest caulk gun I've ever laid my eyes on.
You might see Freud router bits at a box store, but never the selection that a wizard store stocks. You'll pay more, but the sales people know their stuff, and you can get it today, not tomorrow. That's worth a couple bucks if time is money. Incidentally, Freud also makes the Diablo saw blades that you find at box stores, and they're excellent value for the money.
Tools truly specific to furniture making are usually a specialist supplier. You can buy an approximation if a combination square or marking gauge at a box store, but it'll be less irritating to just take your money and light it on fire. Woodcraft and Rockler both have decent stuff if you're near a brick and mortar location. If you aren't, they sell online as does Highland Hardware, and a bunch of other vendors.
How do you know if you're in a wizard store or a muggle store? Wizard stores usually keep hours that reflect the fact that most of their customers are there during their workday, not on their time off. If a store closes by 5:30 and aren't open on the weekend, guaranteed they're a wizard store.
I was actually relieved to find the opposite, that this only concerns the store until it goes out of the door.
There was a story the other day that Office 2010 was no longer activating in some regions because the activation servers just aren't there anymore. The downside of having an iphone-esque "activation lock" is that you could be left with a 10yo drill that isn't permitted to turn on because the activation servers have been abandoned - and any sensible workaround negates its use as a theft deterrent.
That's a neat system. Looks like it works by allowing any phone with the Milwaukee app to identify a nearby tracked tool regardless of who actually owns it. You'd really only be able to keep using a stolen tool as long as the lock-out time is still active and no one with the app comes in range. I wonder if they are able to integrate it with Apple Airtags to at least provide location data.
The easiest way would be to implement the smart gun tech for tools. Keep the paired bracelet at the counter, then the user can wear it when using it. If the bracelet isn't in range, then the tool won't work.
I'm guessing people wouldn't be very happy with this user experience though. Cost for biometric implementation would likely be cost prohibitive.
I don't think a smart gun has ever been sold to consumers in the US. The technology simply isn't reliable enough to be useful. The one model that a company did try to market was so expensive and unreliable[1] that no store imported it. Also people were worried about the built-in kill switch.
why does it have to be biometric at all? Just make it 2FA. Make it so that the bracelet and the tool have to be within, say, 1m of each other and that seems like a viable solution (And obviously have the ability to disable this feature if the user wishes)
"(And obviously have the ability to disable this feature if the user wishes)"
True, that didn't really come to mind since they don't generally talk about allowing that for guns. The best thing is probably using one's phone as the token since the phone has bluetooth and this article mentions that the tools are unlocked with that.
The reason I brought up biometrics is that the unlocking 'token' is less likely to get lost than the bracelet, etc. But that does bring up another good point, that some of the common biometrics like fingerprints wouldn't work since many people wear work gloves.
Although, it would provide a good large-scale proof of concept for smart gun tech if it worked the same as the proposed smart gun tech.
> For example, we've all encountered those silly alarm systems at the doors. As I've never been a shoplifter, I've never had those go off on me except in error. When I worked at CompUSA for 5 years, we had a greeter at the door who told me "they've never once, in 15 years, caught a shoplifter". They went off several times a day, so the only people being stopped at the door were people who had purchased their goods being treated like a shoplifter.
A cashier once forgot to remove the alarm thing on an item I purchased after checking me out. The alarm went off about 20 feet before I was at the sensor, by the time another group was passing through. The security guard checked them and their receipts and let them go. When I passed through no alarm went off.
I used to wear a fleece-lined sweatshirt that would set off the sensors at Barnes and Noble every time. I checked all over for the anti-theft sticker and had washed it multiple times but it must have been inside the jacket.
The simple way already effectively used by companies like B&H is that for high price items or things easily shop lifted, you take a ticket for the item, it's brought to checkout by employees or in b&h's system conveyor belts, and then you purchase it and they hand it to you. This is a solved problem without need for complicated and expensive solutions like yours (which cuts out people paying in cash which is a lot of home depot) or this new solve.
The way you describe and the way this process actually works, in my experience, are two different things.
I'll take the "reason I only buy razor blades online" as an example. I knew my Gillette was really dull and that I'd been out for going on a week, but kept forgetting to pick some up until I stopped at Walgreen's on the way home. I went to the aisle with the blades and was met with a card, instead of a set of blades. I took said card to the register. Walgreens is so slow; I swear the operate on one employee except when the Pharmacy is open. I get to the front, have the card and a now-annoyed cashier.
Three people behind me, she gets on the speaker and calls for assistance, has me step aside and starts ringing up the person behind me. Three people go through the register when Mr. Break comes up to the front to retrieve my item. He grabs the card, looks dubiously at it, says something quiet to the cashier and disappears. Two more customers later, he's back.
"We're out of this one."
"There were several cards there."
"We're supposed to get more in, today."
So I left. About a week later I remembered to order a few hundred dollars' worth online.
In defense of your post, I've seen it work. Except this last holiday season -- mostly due to the restrictions placed on them by the state I live in -- my local Microcenter usually handles this well. If I've happened upon a sales-person, the item I want is taken to the front/locked up before I get there so at least when I'm checking out, I'm not also waiting on someone to find the thing[0].
[0] That ... on one occasion ... ended up being purchased by someone else since I was visiting the store with my boss from out of town and we ended up spending a solid 5 hours there one afternoon.
Locally, right now, it's hard to find ANYONE in the local Home Depot or Lowe's stores who actually works there. The registers have a skeleton crew, there's basically no one "helping" in the aisles, and usually only 1 or 2 people at the customer service and online order pickup desk.
The people you are able to find seem to be brand new at the job and are basically useless, even for simple things like getting the right online order picked from the shelf behind them as they have no idea what the organizational system is.
It's not just that you have to pay someone to do this, you have to be able to simply hire a warm body, and right now that seems horribly hard in retail where I am.
Costco manages it just fine. Want an iPad or iMac? Take the cardboard sheet and hand it to the cashier. Granted, Costco is always staffed, but it is possible.
We're all playing armchair strategist here, but I really don't understand the thinking or the decision here.
I mean, they kind of thought about CX! They didn't want to go with locked containers because they "don't want to affect the 99.5% of our customers who are just there to pick up their hammers and nails". Those 99.5% of customers who would see (not interact with—just see!) said locked container.
Then they go with this complex supply chain solutions that requires additional complexity (e.g., bluetooth technology) to be incorporated at the design step with vendors to make it all work.
That has to be multitudes more expensive than security tags and gates.
What's the error rate on that process? How many legitimate customers are going to be negatively affected by a miss in the "tool activation" step? And think about it: you're not going to figure out that they missed a step until you get home. Not like the alarm going off when you try to walk out the door before they forgot to remove it. Annoying, but at least you're still at the store!
All this in the name of deterrence. Those "silly alarm systems" aren't designed to catch shoplifters... they're to discourage people from shoplifting. Same thing here.
After all, it's not like the shoplifters are going to return the tools that don't work!
That’s an effective deterrent from a certain type of theft. Mostly casual/thrill seeking thieves.
CompUSAs big shrink issues were more organized criminals popping boxes open or flooding the store. I worked at one that was hit by a crime bus — 50 mostly non-English speaking Asians would occupy every employee and loot the place. (They hit all of the big box retailers in our area). The biggest issue was internal fraud.
What you're describing sounds awfully familiar, except for the "loot the place", our store was in Madison Heights, MI, which had/has a large Korean population nearby so it wasn't unusual to have days where it felt like we were being "mobbed by non-English speaking Asians[0]", but I'm not aware of that being used as a distraction at the store I worked at in the 90s -- interesting.
Internal fraud was incredible. One day just about the entire warehouse staff and I want to say a third of the floor staff was fired. If memory serves, the warehouse manager discovered that a large number of specialty "Made for Compaq/Dell" RAM by one of the major RAM vendors had its "COST" value set very wrong (to like $5.00 or something like that). The price paid by employees was whatever IMS said "COST" was. So a $350 memory chip could be purchased for $5.00 by an employee. After figuring it out, of course, he shared the knowledge with other members of staff who participated, as well. Dad always said "if it seems too good to be true, it is", so that -- alone -- was enough to keep me from making that mistake.
The other scam I recall them running was taking items home that were supposed to be destroyed per agreement with the manufacturer. It was very strange coming to work one day and finding out about half of the staff I used to work with was let go for fraud...
[0] We had this one local gentleman who was notoriously frustrating to handle. He'd come in with a million questions, spoke very poor English very quickly and became frustrated to the point of yelling, I think, "F** YOU" at me/storming off when I told him I was having a difficult time understanding ... due to an ear ache (didn't even mention said English; I was pretty good at understanding thick accents, normally).
[1] Not as great as it sounds -- I doubt it was "invoice cost", but if it was a PC/laptop/anything terribly expensive, it was frequently higher than the price of the item.
Some of my memory is coming back -- I recall a somewhat true-sounding explanation as to why the RAM was setup with a $5.00 cost value and why it was specific with branded, "Designed For", memory. I remember hearing that the reason they were fired is that the SKU was supposed to be on a receipt with the computer that was being upgraded; they're never supposed to be sold, alone, and this was something the warehouse manager knew of (he also knew they were poorly audited).
Corporate customers were usually paying on pricing terms that were "X% above cost". And enterprise sales had flexibility further to close a deal. These one-off products had something to do with that -- perhaps it allowed them to offer pre-configured systems for some customers that calculated to the agreed-upon price when their % above cost was calculated, or maybe it was just a way to "throw in the RAM on all of these shiny new Packard (Bells)".
I suspect that those beepers do work: they discourage actual shoplifters to the point that they don't catch them anymore because those shoplifters will move on to stores that don't have the beepers or they successfully lose the tags because they know that they are going to shoplift.
Not being treated like a potential shoplifter would be nice!
A friend of mine and I had these door alarm systems go off while ENTERING a store.
We (around 13 or 14 at that time) had to take off most of our clothes in front of other customers (in the middle of the entry next to the registers) until the "store detective" found out it was my friends cap, wet from the rain that day, that triggered the system.
If the alarm goes off just hold up any piece of paper that looks like a receipt and keep walking. That's what I do when I'm not stealing anything at least, but nobody's ever stopped me to find out.
There's no reason to even bother holding something up. Just keep walking. It's what I've always done, and it's never once caused an issue even if there's somebody at the door.
they are not really meant to catch shop lifters, they are meant to deter shoplifting. And to that extent, they likely work. Maybe not from "professionals", but from little smart ass tikes whom would otherwise think to be 'clever'.
Source: I used to shoplift as a kid. Don't grab the shit with buzzers.
> Change the way shopping is done so that shoplifting doesn't work. I fill a cart, walk through the gate out the door and receive a total, passing my card/phone over a sensor to pay. Of course, this means it's on Home Depot to get it right and I'm sure there will be ways to defeat the system.
This sounds an awful lot like how the Amazon retail / grocery stores work. You arrive, scan a QR code at a gate as you walk in. You take whatever you want, and then leave without dealing with anyone. A bit later, you receive a bill in your email and a charge is made to your card.
It's seamless and super convenient. It's also super creepy once you think about how it must work. I don't think I'd go back after that one visit.
My mum worked in an upscale retail store back in the day when they introduced the first version of that system. As you say they went of on customers all the time, so she or a coworker would be ready with a box chocolates and an apology. This wasn't cheap at all, but it was still worth it because it prevented so much theft.
I don't know if that is still the case, or it is just that thieves go for the easy stores that don't have any security. Back before reddit banned r/shoplifting I lurked there out of curiosity, and it seemed that those who posted there had pretty good ways around that security.
When I worked at CompUSA, our door greeter did pursue a shoplifter who pushed him down on the way out, resulting in a sprained wrist. They ended up firing him because the explicit policy was not to pursue shoplifters for the very reason that risk of injury is too high.
I learned a lot of basic retail stuff at that job, like the fact that, for emergencies, all automatic sliding doors have to be capable of being pushed open. It seems like all the shoplifters knew it, there were a few times I saw someone bang straight on through them.
That's funny when putting it through the lens of the store I worked at. Our door greeter was a 70 year old frail woman who was a little out-spoken. I can actually see her running out the door after a shop-lifter, but I can't see it end well. (I'm just not sure for whom)
> I fill a cart, walk through the gate out the door and receive a total, passing my card/phone over a sensor to pay.
More technology? Maybe the wrong direction.
Oldest "hack" in modern shoplifting is to swap the contents of the boxes. You open two boxes on the floor, swap tools, get the better tool charged for the lesser-priced tool.
Or as you suggest, merely remove the identification tag so it is not charged at all.
I remember that, shopping at CompUSA. Even more annoying we're alarms in items themselves, display items. Turn the item around to look at it and the alarm could go off, and take a staff member 5 minutes to walk over and deactivate it. Then a few minutes later it would happen again with a different product.
We used to attach the little tags to people's clothing, especially customers who were very difficult[0].
I'm not sure who pointed it out, but we learned that simply pushing on the top of the "tag" would keep it from triggering the alarm. A few years later, the boxes started showing up with the tags on the inside (that was nice; we no longer had to tag those boxes before stocking them).
I still wonder, though, if they served any purpose outside of frustrating legitimate customers. I get that they are supposed to serve as a deterrent to casual theft, but when the cameras came in and we started bringing the cops by almost every day for theft, it was clear that the alarm system was serving very little useful purpose.
> but if I got my tool home and it simply didn't work
I have bought items without the anti-theft devices being removed, everything from guns to booze.
In the latter case, on one of the occasions when that happened, it was possible albeit slightly challenging to simply wriggle the anti-theft device off.
In other cases, though, I had to return to the store.
A few years back I purchased a deer rifle from a local sporting goods store and when I got home I realized they had forgotten to remove their trigger lock. It was about a 30min drive back to the store so I just picked the lock and tossed it aside. Naturally, the next day the store calls looking for their lock and they are very adamant I should return their equipment, but they were less inclined to actually drive over to my place and pick it up.
> I couldn't help while reading this thinking 'Security is in charge of Customer Experience'. O
> The alternative is to turn the whole thing upside down. Change the way shopping is done so that shoplifting doesn't work. I fill a cart, walk through the gate out the door and receive a total, passing my card/phone over a sensor to pay.
Your post seemed to start with criticising security being in charge of customer experience, and seemed to end with proposing changing the entire shopping experience to avoid theft.
Sure? The problem isn't that security is integrated into the way the store works, the problem is that security is making things harder for the customer. The proposed solution reworks the store, true, but it does so in order to maximize convenience for the customer.
For example, we've all encountered those silly alarm systems at the doors. As I've never been a shoplifter, I've never had those go off on me except in error. When I worked at CompUSA for 5 years, we had a greeter at the door who told me "they've never once, in 15 years, caught a shoplifter". They went off several times a day, so the only people being stopped at the door were people who had purchased their goods being treated like a shoplifter.
I'm assuming this system will work a lot better than the old, but if I got my tool home and it simply didn't work, I'd be extremely frustrated -- especially if I could have avoided both drives to the retail store and had the product delivered tomorrow, instead.
The alternative is to turn the whole thing upside down. Change the way shopping is done so that shoplifting doesn't work. I fill a cart, walk through the gate out the door and receive a total, passing my card/phone over a sensor to pay. Of course, this means it's on Home Depot to get it right and I'm sure there will be ways to defeat the system. If they fail to ring up an item because it's not detected in the cart, I'm not sure if they have legal recourse at that point, but it also serves to motivate them to make the system a lot more reliable than the current ones are. And you stop treating your customers like shoplifters :)