We used to be able to buy things in this country
Revolution for Cowards
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We used to be able to buy things in this country<br>Locking up toothpaste was a warning sign that our executive class was crazy<br>Jul 21, 2026
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Photo: Justin Sullivan, Getty Images<br>Note to readers: I’ve been writing this piece on and off for a couple of years. It’s longer than my usual posts, and gets into some detail about shoplifting and the retail industry, but I hope you’ll agree that it’s worth it. If you like it, post it or send it to a friend! -Danny<br>Many decades ago, humans developed a process by which they could go into a store, pick an item off the shelf, and pay for it at the checkout counter. A few years ago, we lost it. Now you ring a buzzer, wait for an overworked employee to unlock an item that costs $5.99, and navigate the emotional complications of feeling like both a suspected criminal and an entitled ass.<br>The late Soviet Union was damned by the iconic image of people waiting in endless lines for scarce consumer goods. When we look back at the dying days of America, perhaps we’ll think of waiting in dots, surrounded by plentiful products locked away because our bosses fear and loathe us so much they have forgotten how selling things works.<br>Why has our society gone backward in this small but really annoying way? Surely there must have been an epidemic of shoplifting? No, there really wasn’t. Instead, the great lotion lockup was a corporate moral panic, which has been a disaster for their profits and for the rest of us a degrading enshittification of running basic errands.<br>It’s far from the most important way our lives have gotten worse, but it might be the most pointless – which makes it useful for understanding so much else about a moment in history defined by breathtaking self-sabotage.<br>What’s happened to going to the Walgreens or Target is a store-sized version of what’s happened to living in America. It’s the experience of being subject to the decisions of a ruling class that responds to every challenge with authoritarianism, greed, and the same levels of poise and wisdom as an inbred Pomeranian.
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People lost their damn minds in 2020
This story, like many others in the larger narrative of American derangement, begins with the panicked reactions to the summer of COVID and Black Lives Matter.<br>In the early years of this decade, retail chains announced the closure a number of urban store locations. This shouldn’t have been a surprise given that the pandemic had accelerated the shift to online shopping — and maybe CVS and Rite Aid had overreached by seemingly having stores on every other block.<br>But industry executives and right wing media favored a third explanation: stores were on the run from rampant crime. When Walgreens announced the closure of five stores in San Francisco, a company spokesperson blamed “organized retail crime,” helping to galvanize the recall of progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and fueling a pro-policing backlash around the country.<br>You probably remember headlines about brazen smash-and-grabs at high end retail stores, and helpless urban business owners forced to close up shop in the face of widespread theft and perhaps civilizational collapse. What was happening, we were told, was not just a few incidents being endlessly passed around social media, or a temporary spasm of pent up pandemic aggression, but the work of dangerous new criminal syndicates.<br>Shoplifting no longer fits its traditional mold as a nonviolent crime perpetrated mostly by teens or substance-abusing adults. Nearly two-thirds of the retailers surveyed by the National Retail Federation said that violence associated with store thefts has risen, led by organized gangs that resell the goods they steal.
That’s from a 2022 New York Post article headlined “Shoplifting is soaring across the US – and will only get worse.” In fact it wasn’t, and it didn’t, but as most of us stayed home and doomscrolled, it certainly seemed to be.<br>As politically impactful as store closures were, the defining image of the shoplifting panic was the lockup of toothpaste and tampons behind a plexiglass prison. My friend Amy started referring to her local CVS as “shampoo jail.” We had entered the era of mascara incarceration, of detergent detention, of — and I promise this is the last one:<br>the ham hoosegow
Photo: Twitter/@willystaley<br>Whatever you called it, plexiglass was suddenly everywhere. During an earnings call in 2023, a Rite Aid executive said that stores were “literally putting everything behind showcases to ensure the products are there for customers who want to buy it.”<br>But how many of us would still want to buy products we could no longer take to the checkout counter ourselves? Some industries can get away with steadily making the customer experience worse. Airlines and a certain search engine, for example, operate as a cartel and monopoly, respectively, which means there’s little we can do...