In my household, I am in charge of keeping us stocked with cleaning products and shared toiletries. For many years, this has been remarkably easy, because there is a CVS Pharmacy two blocks from our house, which I regularly pass in the course of my daily activities. Thus I’ve adopted a “just in time” inventory system for most of those products (save toilet paper, scarred as I still am by the pandemic).
Yesterday, I implemented a major change to this policy, trekking all the way to the nearest Target (half a mile) and stocking up on many items in advance. The reason is that CVS has made it increasingly impossible to shop there by locking up more and more shelves. It started with brand-name body wash, which staff assure me is targetted by criminal syndicates who will rush the store and swipe whole shelves worth into their bag before absconding. I’m going to be frank — I don’t believe this is true and refuse to accept any evidence that it is. There just cannot be a black market in body wash, particularly not one that can absorb whole stores’ worth of stock on an ongoing basis. But even if there were, the stores haven’t stopped there, as an increasing, and unpredictable, number of products are locked up. Laundry soap. Soft Scrub. Dishwasher pods, but only in certain types of packaging. Sometimes even toothpaste.
For a long time, I tried to work around this system by only buying products that were unlocked. Thankfully, the “thieves” did not target store-brand body wash, for example. When I was in a pinch, I was sometimes forced to buy the locked-up product. Once I even expressed my frustration to the employee, then immediately felt like the most abject Karen. After all, the policy wasn’t their fault — a classic Dan Davies-style accountability sink, where one can never track down who is responsible for a given decision. Eventually, shopping there simply became too unpleasant and frustrating, as I could not predict what would be locked up and what was actually available for sale. I spent a lot of money in that CVS, often multiple times a week, week after week, for years. If I wasn’t their very best customer on the consumer good side, I would like to meet my competition. And they drove me away, while providing me no mechanism to tell them why.
This is surely not the greatest tragedy in the world, but it does point to a basic brokenness in our economic system, one that is getting worse and worse.Simply put, the way we were taught the market for consumer goods is supposed to work does not seem to hold anymore. The market was supposed to incentivize businesses to offer attractive products, at competitive prices, in a convenient format, and then customers were supposed to respond to those positive signals by rewarding them with their business. Now businesses increasingly take actively customer-hostile actions — locking up products, replacing paper menus with cumbersome QR codes, and of course chronically understaffing everything, which is the root of all of these issues — and insulate themselves from any feedback.
This claim may seem paradoxical, since businesses are continually clamoring for a certain type of feedback. I feel like I am asked to rate dozens upon dozens of transactions a day on some kind of five-point scale, and higher-stakes encounters (like medical visits) result in repeated demands to participate in a full-dress, multi-step satisfaction survey. Even the public bathrooms in Chicago Union Station have built-in devices for patrons to register their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the level of cleanliness.
Whenever I receive one of these demands, I want to shout in Don Draper style: that’s what the money was for! But of course, if I refrain from rating, or — unthinkably — register fewer than five stars, I am violating the tenets of social justice. Don’t I see that all of these poor workers are underpaid and exploited and will be arbitrarily cast aside if I rate them lower than five stars? I most often submit to this blackmail, just as I always tip generously even for abyssmal service. But by doing so, I am contributing to blocking yet another avenue for the supposed market signals to do their work. What’s more, I am taking responsibility for work that is supposed to be carried out by the firm’s management — namely, assessing employee performance. I can’t get stores to sell me products in the convenient manner that has held from time immemorial, but I can get them to arbitrarily fire members of their already insufficient staff. Why is this a desirable equilibrium?
Pondering the bizarrely self-undermining practice of actively preventing customers from buying stuff, I can’t help but suspect that CVS’s supposed theft prevention is part of some inscrutable financial play — that they are intentionally destroying their consumer basis so they can “pivot” to something more likely to offer “outsize returns.” Maybe losing money would somehow be good from a tax perspective! After all, we are all by now familiar with the travails of companies bought out by private equity, which are forced to pay off the very loans used to purchase the company and inevitably collapse under the weight. Again and again, private equity firms behave like Tony Soprano’s crew performing a “bust-out” on a profitable business to drive it into the ground, and again and again, some combination of consumer preference and poor business strategy are blamed for the destructive outcome. The most recent example is of course Red Lobster, which was popularly believed to have been driven out of business by their imprudent offer of “all you can eat shrimp” but was really sucked dry by the demand to service their private equity buyer’s debt. As a result, rich assholes are richer and people who would gladly pay a reasonable price for “all you can eat shrimp” are left empty-handed, their demand unmet by the market.
Things become even more opaque in online spaces, where major platforms implement mysterious algorithms that determine what we are allowed to see. Facebook is the best-known culprit here. You sign up for a group or “like” some news feed, and at a certain point the algorithm decides that part of your life is over and never serves you any of those posts again. At the same time, you are served random content from friends with no rhyme or reason — for instance, I have several times been served time-sensitive requests for recommendations weeks after the moment have passed, and seen that post repeatedly for days and days. Now they have added in a lot of AI-generated slop, to the point where posts from my actual friends are few and far between. The apparent goal here is to make Facebook unusable so that people will transfer to Instagram or Threads or whatever else they’ve decided we should use instead of Facebook. We can’t be allowed to simply keep up with old friends in the manner that apparently made Facebook (I refuse to type their absurd new name) a multi-billion-dollar behemoth. They’re pivoting to a new play, and we need to go with them.
Worst of all, of course, is the generative AI trend, which is being forcibly integrated into every operating system and software package despite the fact that it doesn’t work and no one wants it. Here, the end user is literally irrelevant — the whole mad scheme is obviously targetted at the audience of investors, and specifically their irrational belief that AI is the next big thing. By signalling that they’re “going all in on AI,” the tech giants believe they can shore up their share prices, and therefore the all-important compensation packages of their executives.
It has always been the case that our capitalist overlords were playing a game — accumulating surplus-value — that ultimately had nothing to do with us or our needs. But in many times and places, that game at least had the beneficial side-effect of fulfilling some of our needs and desires. When it better approximated the simplified propagandized model we are all taught in school, we as consumers had at least some minimal agency in determining the success or failure of a product or firm, if only by withdrawing our patronage. Now a combination of monopolization, financialization, and algorithmization has eliminated even that small point of leverage, rendering us pawns and spectators within the system that still, at the end of the day, determines our livelihoods. Businesses fail not because their product isn’t desired, but because they aren’t delivering a double digit rate of return to the person who ultimately bought it in order to destroy it. Entire product lines are eliminated or radically changed to chase fads in financial markets rather than anticipate or fulfill (or even create) consumer needs.
Capitalism was never a good system — I’ve been on record in favor of its abolition my entire adult life — but it at least used to be minimally legibile to the general public. Now, nothing really makes sense to anyone but high-level investors, and with the increasing popularity of algorithmic or even AI-driven investing, it is likely going to reach a tipping point where it is no longer legible to them, either. I’ve argued before that the market was always a kind of emergent AI, but we do seem to be reaching a tipping point. And I have no idea what it would look like to stop it — much less undo it once it has tipped. In the meantime, I guess all I can do is try to support retailers who actually allow me to shop in their store and hope for the best.
An und für sich 
Once again “all that is solid melts into air” is the most apt description of capitalism’s evolution. Its reputation has never been lower in my lifetime, but I too am at a loss over what to do. I do know I avoid the local Target now.
CVS and Walgreens are the largest prescription drug sellers in the US, and they often have the highest prices, particularly for those without insurance where it can be 2x the price of Walmart, Krogers, Amazon, etc. Advertising prescription drug prices (price varies by your insurance plan), basically never occurs and most consumers associate CVS and Walgreens with prescription drugs. So their market share dominance remains without price competition.
CVS isn’t just a retailer. Over the years they’ve used their profits to acquire various medical and especially pharmacy related businesses. In particular, they own one of the big three pharmacy benefit managers (middle men), who set drug prices with insurance plans and many other buyers. It puts small pharmacies at a big disadvantage. CVS also owns Aetna and Caremark. They also run the pharmacies in Target stores.
I suspect the large majority of CVS profit is from prescription drugs in one way or another. Profits from selling snacks and drinks, like gas stations do to make money is also nice. The other items may not be loss leaders, but they would rather sell none of them at 0% profit than stock them at a loss. If in doubt, they just lock them up.
Their business is convoluted collusion. I doubt they give a damn about selling toilet paper.
What is happening is that cleaning products (usually laundry detergent, but it has spread to other products) function as a currency in the black market, like cigarettes and nylons in the Casablanca-esque economy of WWII Europe. They’re things that people will need, and which do not decay, and therefore function as money. This then makes them targets for bulk shoplifting.