This sounds terrible. Is this a store that sees a significant amount of tourist traffic? I am very surprised Target with its image would want to present a store like this to tourists, especially families going to Disneyland.ClownLoach wrote: ↑November 4th, 2022, 8:48 am Went to what is known as the "Disneyland Target" yesterday in Garden Grove, CA. Location on Harbor Blvd. About two miles south of the park. This is a very busy store, the Target my parents took me to shop in when I was a kid. Store was recently remodeled again and I saw a few interesting changes.
First, this location went to concrete floors and they are probably the worst ones I've seen in any Target. The building is one of the original California Target stores, I believe it was a FedMart. Nobody in their right mind would try to dig up that nasty subfloor. Trenches, pipe caps and all sorts of actual trip hazards especially around the front end although they somehow managed to remove the glue lines from the linoleum. Zero shine or polish. Really made me wonder what was the point of the conversion. This was worse than some of the horrific Ralphs and Fred Meyer conversions where they wound up going back and putting linoleum back down.
Second, this store is the first I've seen in California to implement the full next generation RFID system that they were testing in Las Vegas. It's an even newer version. There are giant 24 inch wide Zebra RFID antennas spread across the entire ceiling, wide RFID readers hanging over every door, etc. So Target must have found a way around the California laws that supposedly restrict the usage of this technology if it could be considered "customer tracking.". With the implementation they have which includes overhead door canopy readers, and even readers over the bathroom hallway, they can easily combine camera surveillance/facial recognition plus the triangulation of RFID tags to track exactly what items you have in your possession in the store. The implementation is clearly more than just for easier tracking of inventory (with this in place theoretically there is no longer a need to scan the shelves as they're constantly being counted by this system, and it also helps the store employees locate missing or out of place items like a GPS). And a shoplifter can easily be identified as they can say that they walked out the door with X items in their possession and didn't pay for them - which really bends the rules of the classic "5 steps to apprehension.". So I wonder if they will widen the usage of this system in California since they seem to be able to get away with using it here, and they wouldn't have spent millions of dollars installing it just to "test the waters" or "see if anyone notices and says something."
Finally - they have implemented levels of security that would probably be in place in San Francisco or other tough areas. For the first time Target seems to be significantly increasing the usage of glass case security. In the remodel they added Ulta Beauty, but nearly everything is behind full height glass doors. The entire laundry detergent aisle, all brands, was behind glass doors. Same for all the cell phone accessories and I saw glass cases scattered around in other departments where I had not seen them before at Target. I didn't have a reason to purchase anything that would be locked up in one, but they had what appears to be a electronic locking mechanism built into the base deck of the gondola and has a large key lock. It appears to be something that they can enable or disable. The doors are not sliding like traditional glass cases but open outwards like a cabinet. I am not even sure if they were actually locked in that laundry detergent aisle. Could be something that they lock and unlock depending on the time of day, if for example they have lots of theft at night they could just lock the doors at 7pm. Each door had two uniformed LP agents, self checkout was supervised at each end by a uniformed LP agent (who can't do anything to assist the customer on the register as they don't have a login), and there were at least two roaming the store again in uniform. By far the most glass cases and security I've ever seen at a Target and felt more like I was shopping at a red painted Walmart. Clearly Target, which historically has tried to protect ease of shopping for the customer, is suddenly moving to aggressively toughen their security levels to reduce shrink.
What about the HBA/OTC/drug area, was that all still open/self serve? We have seen those Wal Marts where that entire section is locked and anything you want from it goes into one of those giant plastic security boxes...
I've never seen a Wal Mart with all of the laundry detergent locked up...
If you have to have multiple additional LP assigned just to self checkout, I start to question if it makes sense to have the self checkout or just pay for additional cashiers at that point and eliminate the self checkout...