You go into Walgreens for one thing. You find it four aisles in, sitting behind a sheet of clear plastic with a little call button screwed to the shelf next to it. You press the button. A soft chime goes off somewhere near the pharmacy. Nothing happens. You press it again, feel like a jerk, and start doing math on whether this is worth it.
Drugstores have been putting more and more of the shelf behind plastic cases for years now, and most shoppers have made their peace with the razor blades and the pricey skin serums. The one that still makes people furious is deodorant. A $6 stick of Old Spice, Secret or Degree, locked up like a watch at a jewelry counter.
There is a reason for it, and there are ways to get in and out of that store without losing fifteen minutes of your life. Both are worth knowing before your next trip.
Why A $6 Stick Of Deodorant Gets The Plexiglass
Deodorant hits every mark a thief looks for. It is small enough to palm. It costs enough to be worth reselling. Every household in America buys it, so it moves fast on online marketplaces where nobody asks where it came from. And drugstores make solid money on it, which is the part shoppers tend to miss.
Stores do not lock up everything that gets stolen. They lock up what hurts most to lose, what retail crime researcher Adrian Beck of the University of Leicester calls “the vital few.” The profitable items go behind the plastic and the cheap, low-margin stuff stays open, because a retailer would rather eat the loss on a 99-cent notebook than on a shelf of antiperspirant. In the National Retail Federation’s last big shrink survey, covering 2022, theft from outside the store accounted for roughly 36% of what retailers call shrink, with employee theft at about 29%, so nearly two-thirds of lost inventory traced back to somebody taking something.
Drugstores sell a higher share of small, pricey, easy-to-resell goods than almost any other kind of store. That is why your CVS looks like a vending machine and your hardware store does not.
Know What Else Is Behind The Glass Before You Go
Deodorant is not alone in the cabinet. Laundry detergent jugs, especially Tide and Gain, get locked because detergent resells fast. Razor blade refills have been secured for years and now commonly sit in glass cabinets right in the personal care aisle. Allergy pills and cold syrup, infant formula, electric toothbrushes, drugstore mascara and foundation, and bags of whole bean coffee and espresso pods are all common lockups.
Build your list around that. If three of your five items are locked, do them first, not last. Get an employee once, have them walk all three up front, then shop the open aisles while your stuff waits at the register. One flag-down instead of three is the single biggest time saver in this whole mess.
Press The Button Once, Then Go Find An Actual Person
The call button is the slowest path to a stick of deodorant. A study commissioned by a lock-case maker put the average retrieval time at about 1.5 minutes. Mystery shoppers sent out by the research firm RDSolutions waited 7.7 minutes on average, and one waited 46.
Shoppers are not imagining the aggravation. In a survey by the customer-experience firm A Closer Look, locking showcases topped the list of retail security annoyances at 64.9% of customers, well ahead of cables that tether products to the shelf at 40.7%.
So press the button once and then go get someone yourself. The pharmacy counter is your best bet, because those employees are stationary, they are not going to wander off mid-task, and they either hold a key or can radio someone who does. The photo counter and the front register are the backups. Ask for the item by name and aisle number, not by pointing at a case they cannot see. Saying “the Secret clinical, aisle four” gets you helped faster than “the locked thing back there.”
Order It On The App And Pick It Up At The Counter
The cleanest workaround is to never touch the case. Order the locked item through the store’s own app or website for in-store pickup, and an employee pulls it off the shelf with the key they already have on their belt. You walk to the pickup counter, say your name, and leave.
Only 9% of shoppers who run into a locked product order it online from that same retailer, according to a Numerator survey. Most stand there and wait for help instead. If you already know your neighborhood store keeps deodorant and razors locked, placing the order from the parking lot and walking in ten minutes later beats standing in the aisle hoping someone shows up.
This also works for the monthly haul. Put the detergent, the blade refills and the formula in one pickup order and leave only the open-shelf items for the actual walk-around.
The Store Brand Sitting Right Next To It Is Usually Open
Look one shelf over before you flag anybody down. Stores lock the name brands they make the most on and leave the house brands out in the open, because nobody is running a resale operation on Equate antiperspirant. Walmart’s Equate, Target’s up & up, CVS Health and the Walgreens label are almost always grabbable, and they usually run a dollar or two cheaper than the locked version.
This is what retailers already expect you to do. When shoppers hit a locked case, says Robb Northrup of the shelving company siffron, they skip the item, grab a substitute, or buy it online later. Taking the substitute is the only one of those three that gets you out of the store with what you came for.
Pick A Different Store, Or Just A Different Hour
Lockup policy is not uniform across a chain. It is set store by store, and locations with heavy foot traffic and higher local theft lock up more merchandise than quieter ones. The same banner two miles down the road may have the entire personal care aisle sitting wide open.
Worth five minutes of testing: next time you drive past the other location, walk in and check the deodorant and detergent shelves. If they are open, that becomes your store for those items and you stop fighting the case at all.
Timing matters just as much. A weekday mid-morning trip has a stocked floor and multiple employees on shift. Nine at night, you are waiting on the one person running the register and the one in the pharmacy, and neither can leave their post.
Check The Case For A Keypad Or QR Code First
Not every case needs a key anymore. Chains have been testing self-locking cabinets that open when a shopper enters a phone number or scans a QR code with their own phone, along with systems any employee can pop open from a smartphone instead of hunting down the one key holder on shift. CVS has tested app unlocking in New York City stores, and the St. Louis grocer Schnucks put phone-number cases in more than 40 stores.
These look like plain plastic doors from four feet away. Walk up and read the sticker before you hit the call button. If there is a keypad or a code, you are thirty seconds from your deodorant instead of ten minutes.
Buy Two And Stop Playing This Game Monthly
Once you have a human standing there with the case open, buy two or three. Deodorant does not spoil, detergent does not spoil, razor cartridges do not spoil. Turning a monthly hassle into a quarterly one is the whole win, and the multipack price per ounce is almost always better anyway.
Retailers are not thrilled about any of this either. Then-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.”
The Cases Are Not Coming Off Anytime Soon
Shoplifting actually fell in 2025. Retailers reported a 12.4% drop in shoplifting incidents compared with 2024, and an 8.1% decline in merchandise theft, according to the National Retail Federation’s 2026 report with the Loss Prevention Research Council.
The incidents that remain are the ugly ones. Half of retailers report more repeat offenders, 40% report more organized retail crime, and 37% report more walkout or pushout theft, where someone fills a bag and walks out the door. A locked case does not stop that, and stores know it. They keep the cases because locking a shelf is cheaper than hiring more people to watch it.
Most of this never reaches a police report. Nearly two-thirds of retailers say they report fewer than half of their store theft incidents, citing losses too small to meet felony thresholds and little expectation that anyone will follow up.
Take the chains at their word on this one. They have told their own investors that locked cases cost them sales, and they are doing it anyway. Stop waiting for the plastic to come off and build the workaround into your routine: pickup orders for the locked stuff, house brands where you do not care about the label, pharmacy counter when you need a key, and never, ever a 9 p.m. deodorant run.
