Good morning. It’s Tuesday. Today we’ll find out about an app that lets customers open locked cabinets in three CVS stores in Manhattan without having to seek assistance from an employee. We’ll also get details on revenue for the first month of congestion pricing.
The locked cabinet opened when I held my cellphone over the lock. The trouble came after I took the exfoliating cleanser off the shelf and put it in my shopping basket.
I was in the CVS store on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village, using an app on my smartphone that is supposed to make shopping easier. It does, when it works. Does it make shopping faster? I’m not sure.
CVS, like other chain drugstores, moved to fight shoplifting by putting lockable cabinets in its stores in New York City — and putting everyday items like toothbrushes and over-the-counter pain medications inside. A shopper has to press a button, which triggers an announcement over the store’s public address system — “Customer assistance needed in the skin care department,” in my case. An employee then walks to that aisle, unlocks the cabinet and waits while the shopper picks out the exfoliating cleanser. The employee then closes and relocks the cabinet.
Last month CVS updated its app, adding a feature that lets shoppers at three stores in Manhattan unlock the cabinets with their smartphones. No customer assistance necessary.
The marketing intelligence firm Sensor Tower said there was a 17 percent increase in downloads of the CVS app in January. Sensor Tower said the jump might have been driven by shoppers who wanted to use the app in the three stores, where shoppers with the app can do what I did.
When everything goes smoothly, the app allows shoppers to avoid having to wait for a store employee to appear. And that’s good for business, as restricting access to products deters thieves but also shoppers.
“When you lock up your products, you lock out your customers,” Brittain Ladd, a strategy and supply chain consultant, said last month, adding that CVS and Walgreens “have really gone wild in terms of putting Plexiglas all throughout their stores.” A CVS spokeswoman, Tara Burke, said as much when she told me that “we know keeping products locked up can be inconvenient.”
But she also said that shoplifting remained a problem. Theft from CVS stores has increased 30 percent since 2020, she said, adding that locking up products was “a measure of last resort.”
CVS introduced the app as a pilot program at the store on Bleecker Street and two others: at 630 Lexington Avenue, at 53rd Street; and the one I tried first, at 540 Amsterdam Avenue, at 86th Street. I was looking for cough syrup and razor blades.
I logged in but couldn’t get the app to open the cabinet with the cough syrup. A store employee who had walked up the aisle to help someone else saw me holding my phone over the lock and said, “Here, let me.”
I moved on to the razor blades, where the app opened the lock on the cabinet.
But I got messages about an “unexpected error” a couple of times, so I logged out and then in again. And at least once a message appeared saying that the unlocking function was not available in that store.
I left wondering if the app was really ready for prime time, which is why I decided to go to the other two stores.
At the one on Lexington Avenue several days later — when I needed more cough syrup — the app did not open the cabinet despite several tries. “Sometimes it works,” said the employee who unlocked that cabinet for me.
But the app did unlock the cabinet next to the one with the cough syrup. I didn’t need anything from there, but I’d been curious to see what would happen.
Things went better at the Bleecker Street store. I started with the exfoliating cleanser, and the app unlocked the cabinet on the first try. But when I tried to lock the cabinet after taking out the item, it wouldn’t lock.
It took me a minute to see why: The other sliding door in the cabinet had slipped open. I closed it. The lock clicked.
In Aisle 8, I got an “unexpected error” message. I logged off and logged in again. That time, the app unlocked the cabinet with unexpected fanfare. A bell rang and a recorded voice said, “Thank you for shopping at CVS.”
I went on to Aisle 10. At the toothpaste cabinet, there was another “unexpected error.”
That was when I noticed that the cabinet I was trying to unlock was already open.
Weather
Today, expect a mostly cloudy sky and a high near 53. Tonight, the sky will turn partly cloudy, and the low will be near 39.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Friday (Losar).
The latest New York news
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The search for cheap eggs: The bird flu outbreak has led to a shortage of eggs. That scarcity has injected a particular kind of chaos in a city where prices and availability fluctuate from block to block.
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Closing a shelter for migrants: Mayor Eric Adams announced that the Roosevelt Hotel, nicknamed “the new Ellis Island,” would stop housing migrants by June. He said that the closing would be a milestone in the city’s response to the migrant crisis.
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Inmate dies amid a labor dispute: A 61-year-old man died over the weekend at Auburn Correctional Facility, where National Guard soldiers have been deployed to help with staffing shortages after corrections officers walked off the job.
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Remembering Roberta Flack: The singer and pianist whose intimate blend of soul, jazz and folk made her one of the most popular artists of the 1970s, was 88.
The money from congestion pricing is rolling in
Congestion pricing brought in $48.6 million in its first month, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said.
That is the latest indication that congestion pricing is doing what it was created to do — generate revenue for upgrades to mass transit — even as the Trump administration moves to stop it, my colleagues Stefanos Chen and Winnie Hu write.
Of the $48.6 million, the M.T.A. counted $37.5 million as net operating revenue, money that will go toward financing a number of major transit repair projects. The rest will pay for expenses related to installing cameras and other equipment to record and process the tolls.
Jai Patel, the co-chief financial officer of the transit agency, said that 95 percent of the tolls were recorded in the peak period, from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends. “That seems like a big number,” Patel said, “but the program itself is to reduce congestion, and so peak tolls would be best.”
She also told an M.T.A. committee meeting on Monday that congestion pricing was expected to generate about $500 million in revenue during its first year.
The M.T.A. will leverage the money, borrowing significantly more in municipal bonds. Its planned projects include modernizing subway signals, some of which were installed during the Depression; making stations more accessible for riders with disabilities; and extending the Second Avenue subway line to East Harlem.
Those projects may be put on hold if the Trump administration succeeds in rescinding the congestion pricing program. And a protracted legal fight with the federal government could scare away investors, said Ana Champeny, the vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a civic watchdog group.
“The market may have a different take on how risky they consider congestion pricing now,” she said, noting that it was unusual for the federal government to renege on an agreement for a program like congestion pricing. The Biden administration approved it in November, after President Joe Biden lost the election.
METROPOLITAN diary
Halloween on the A
Dear Diary:
It was Halloween a few years ago, and I was on an A train traveling from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Most of the passengers in the car were in costumes that included Prince, Elvis, Madonna and a stuffed toy. No one was talking, and everyone seemed to be traveling alone.
At one point, three young men carrying a boom box got on the train and took positions as if getting ready to put on a show that was most likely going to include somersaults.
As soon as the boom box clicked on, all of the costumed passengers jumped up and started to dance. The would-be acrobats clicked off the music.
No, no, sit down, they said. We are trying to make a living here.
Everyone sat back down, laughing. Then the box clicked on again, the costumed passengers jumped up to dance again and the acrobats asked them to sit down again.
The sequence played out three more times before the young men finally gave up and went to another car.
We all kept laughing.
— Carol Williams. Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Makaelah Walters and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post I Tried Using an App to Unlock Cabinets at Drugstores appeared first on New York Times.
