COMPTON, California — For years, stores across Southern California have been putting high-priced items behind lock and key to deter thieves.

The Rite Aid on the corner of Long Beach and Compton boulevards, though, takes this approach to security to a new extreme. Customers there are greeted by rows and rows of shelved items — makeup, chips, baby formula, paper towels, lotion and juice — that are locked behind plexiglass.

Most of the items in the store are accessible only after clicking a button that will summon an employee to come over, open the case and retrieve what the customer is interested in (and put it back if the interest fades).

The community is split on the store's move, and employees are speaking out about how disruptive the change has been to their workday.

At 8:30 a.m. Thursday, Compton native Kimiko Jones, 43, said she reluctantly visited this Rite Aid location because she needed cough medicine for a family member. Jones said she prefers to go to other locations in neighboring cities — where she can take items off the shelves herself — but on Thursday it was early enough that she knew she wouldn't need to wait long for assistance.

"It's disappointing because if the people in the community wouldn't come here and do smash and grabs, or come in with their big duffel bags to fill with merchandise, we wouldn't have to go through this," Jones said.

It's unclear when the store put so many of its wares behind lock and key and whether more Rite Aid locations will follow suit.

"Like many in the industry, we are seeing a higher level of brazen shoplifting and organized retail crime," the company said in a statement. "We are taking an active role in helping law enforcement in their pursuit of shoplifters, as well as continuing our efforts to educate community leaders on the impact of retail theft and advocate for solutions."

The statement went on to say that the company is applying "multi-layer product protection solutions that are regularly assessed."

Rite Aid has closed hundreds of stores in California since filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023 as it struggles to deal with creditors and lawsuits over opioid prescriptions.

In 2022, the National Retail Federation identified Los Angeles as the city with the worst organized retail crime problem, ahead of the San Francisco/Oakland region, New York City and Houston.

Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a package of bills to address the rise in organized retail theft by making it easier for police to arrest shoplifters and disrupt larger retail crime rings.

During the few visits Jones has made to the Compton Rite Aid, she said, theft had gotten so bad the shelves were mostly empty.

This has been a stressful transition, pharmacy technician Julissa Blackburn said.

Since the products were locked up, Blackburn said, fewer customers have been coming in. And the people who do visit the location have been complaining about the change and the wait time that comes with it.

"It's tiring," Blackburn said. "At the end of the day my feet hurt and I [feel] so much stress, I get a lot of headaches."

She said that on a typical day, there are about two to three employees in the store and about six employees in the pharmacy, which she said isn't enough.

"Just have a little more patience with us and try to understand that we're trying to do as much as we can for everybody here," Blackburn said.

Mauro Villalba, 60, welcomed the store's new policy because he said he's witnessed people steal from this Rite Aid location, and cashiers aren't able to do anything about it.

Putting more items behind plexiglass, he said, was a logical next step for the pharmacy, as he's seen several other stores in the area start to lock up their products.

Pharmacy technician Cynthia Ayala, who has worked at another Rite Aid location for 15 years, said the company may be boasting about safety with the newly locked up items, but "it's frustrating because you can still get pushed out of the way if somebody wants to steal something, it becomes more of an unsafe situation."

Employees were already feeling the stress of being unable to stop shoplifters and listening to customer complaints when shelves were empty, she said. The new security measures, she added, were just another layer of tension.

"If you have a customer waiting for 15 or 20 minutes, they're going to be pissed by the time we get there and the customer experience is over," Ayala said.

Ayala and Blackburn are members of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770, which is currently negotiating with Rite Aid over wages, worker hours and benefits.

Eva Guzman, 76, was brought to the Rite Aid pharmacy by her daughter, 54-year-old Eva Martinez, to get her vaccinations. Gomez said she first heard about the store's change on the news.

She said it was shocking to see this happening at her community Rite Aid, which she frequents for medications, food and other items, "all because of the delinquent behavior that has been happening around here."

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