CVS Will Make Shopping Slightly Less Annoying If You Download An App, Consent To Being Tracked
I don’t know if it’s the same where you are, but all the pharmacies here in South Seattle have a decidedly… apocalyptic feel. Many shelves are empty. A lot of goods have been locked up to address a retail theft epidemic that didn’t actually happen. And understaffed stores are usually overseen by one fifteen year old kid who looks like he just sustained a prolonged WW2 woodland artillery assault.
A big reason for the problems has been several fold; one, some chains are trying to compensate for the settlements they faced for helping to enable the opioid academic. Others are suffering at the hands of repeated, pointless mergers, one of which killed a popular, locally-owned, Seattle chain, Bartells.
With that as backdrop, many drug store executives have continued to lock down their goods, which not only makes life harder on the limited number of staffers, but as Walgreens’ CEO recently acknowledged, results in people buying less goods because it’s simply too time consuming and annoying. That in turns drives even more customers to online retailers like Amazon.
Now CVS appears to be trying to solve some of the problems they created by letting customers unlock goods on store shelves themselves. But to accomplish the simple task of putting some fingernail clippers in their carts, store visitors have to register an account, download the CVS app, and consent to being tracked around the store via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi so their behavior and location data can be monetized:
“To use the feature, customers need to be logged into the CVS app, connected to the store’s Wi-Fi, and have Bluetooth turned on. Tilak Mandadi, CVS Health’s executive vice president, told the Wall Street Journal that CVS plans to expand the pilot to 10 to 15 stores soon, with hopes of rolling it out across its 9,000 U.S. locations in the future.”
It’s important to remember that despite a lot of inaccurate journalism and lawmaker rhetoric on the subject, there isn’t a “shoplifting epidemic,” and the problem has actually declined in many major cities. That’s not to to say theft isn’t still a problem in many stores and cities, but nothing close to the absolute hyperventilation seen in major press outlets.
That hyperventilation was used to justify a more draconian tough-on-crime crackdown on lower-stakes theft (occurring, ironically, while most lawmakers did nothing about what increasingly appears to be an illegal oligarch takeover of the entirety of U.S. federal governance). All while execs fancy themselves innovators by making unnecessary annoyances annoying in a slightly different way.
This all drives more and more business to online retailers, which in turn results in pharmacies doing more pointless mergers, and more weird nickel-and-diming and anti-consumer restrictions to try and get back to providing Wall Street those sweet, improved quarterly turns. So, as in a growing number of American industries, the enshittification continues unabated.