Home Depot is introducing power tools that won’t work if they’re stolen
I couldn&#x27;t help while reading this thinking &#x27;Security is in charge of Customer Experience&#x27;.  Obviously theft is a serious problem for the likes of retail -- and shoplifting is something that isn&#x27;t 100% preventable.  You can reduce it, but you can&#x27;t stop it.  And every step you take to reduce it risks alienating customers.<p>For example, we&#x27;ve all encountered those silly alarm systems at the doors.  As I&#x27;ve never been a shoplifter, I&#x27;ve never had those go off on me except in error.  When I worked at CompUSA for 5 years, we had a greeter at the door who told me &quot;they&#x27;ve never once, in 15 years, caught a shoplifter&quot;.  They went off <i>several times a day</i>, so the only people being stopped at the door were people who had purchased their goods being <i>treated</i> like a shoplifter.<p>I&#x27;m assuming this system will work a lot better than the old, but if I got my tool home and it simply didn&#x27;t work, I&#x27;d be extremely frustrated -- especially if I could have avoided both drives to the retail store and had the product delivered tomorrow, instead.<p>The alternative is to turn the whole thing upside down.  Change the way shopping is done so that shoplifting doesn&#x27;t work.  I fill a cart, walk through the gate out the door and receive a total, passing my card&#x2F;phone over a sensor to pay.  Of course, this means it&#x27;s on Home Depot to get it right and I&#x27;m sure there will be ways to defeat the system.  If they fail to ring up an item because it&#x27;s not detected in the cart, I&#x27;m not sure if they have legal recourse at that point, but it also serves to motivate them to make the system a lot more reliable than the current ones are.  And you stop treating your customers like shoplifters :)