When security gets in the way of things

A while back I went clothes shopping with my brother. While we were waiting in line, it occurred to me how the stores go to great lengths to prevent shoplifting. They obviously cannot have security cameras in the fitting rooms so they need another mechanism, and one popular way is to allow the customers to bring only a certain number of items into the fitting rooms. A lot of places enforce this by counting the number of items you’re bringing into the room (with an upper limit) and handing you a small badge showing exactly how many you’re bringing with you. When you come back out, the number on the badge is compared to the number of items you’re carrying.

This is a pretty simple and straightforward scheme that works quite well. With this post, however, I wanted to highlight how commonly used this approach has become that the stores (and their employees) seem to have forgotten why it was created in the first place.

My brother and I happened to end up in a store that used this exact approach. After having picked out the clothes we wanted to try on, we went to the fitting room area where we were met by a huge line of people waiting for their turn. When we finally got to the front of the line, it turned out that there were actually plenty of fitting rooms available but there was only one sales assistant around who could hand out badges. Everybody therefore had to wait for him to go through the line, one by one, and showing each customer to an available fitting room.

Unfortunately, he was so busy counting the number of items for the people entering the fitting rooms that he barely had time to look at the people coming out and instead they just dumped the badges on the nearest table and left. The sales assistant didn’t seem to care at all.

When my brother and I came out of the fitting room, the sales assistant was nowhere to be found. Other people came out too and looked similarly confused. Just like the people before us, we simply dumped our badges and the clothes we didn’t want to buy and left.

What annoyed me the most was that we’d spent more than 10 minutes in line for no reason at all. There was absolutely no point whatsoever in having the sales assistant hand out badges since he never checked them when people came back out.

In my opinion, this is what happens when security gets in the way of things. It’s understandable that the store wants to avoid shoplifting, but if they don’t follow through on their security measures then it just becomes a customer annoyance.

I hate wasting my time…