Over the weekend I spent a good part of one day helping a friend do some work in his garage. At one point we realized we needed a small adapter for his socket set and a few other small items so we made a run to the hardware store.

Until recently there had been an Ace hardware just a couple miles from his house but earlier this year that store closed. Usually, stores don’t announce why they are closing but my friend said he believed they were having problems with retail theft.

We wound up driving a couple extra miles to the next closest Ace hardware which was in the next city over. This one seemed pretty busy but we immediately noticed there were a lot of sales associates around. It wasn’t just 1 or 2 it was five or six. They seemed to be stationed all around the store. We asked for help finding a socket adapter and one of the associates walked us to the correct aisle where everything was locked in a glass case. He unlocked it and helped us find what we were looking for and then took it to the front register for us. This wasn’t optional. All merchandise in the case, including the $17 pack of small parts we were buying, could only be handled by employees.

We left convinced that Ace hardware was clearly struggling with shoplifting and that this had indeed been the reason the other store closed. In order to avoid the same fate, the surviving Ace store was adopting the same sort of practices that drug stores in San Francisco and Portland have been using. There are simply too many thieves these days who are willing to walk out with whatever they can lay their hands on.

Back in May I wrote about Giant Food, a grocery chain in the Washington, DC area. My grandparents shopped at the Giant Food in Silver Spring, MD for most of their lives so I’ve been to that location many times. But latetly the chain is struggling with retail theft, or shrink as it’s known in the industry. Ira Kress, the president of Giant Food told the Washington Post, “To say [theft has] risen tenfold in the last five years would not be an understatement.”

Saturday the Post published a follow up story about Giant’s last ditch efforts to combat shrink at their last remaining store east of the Anacostia River by removing lots of frequently stolen name brand products from their stores.

Giant Food, which has 165 supermarkets across D.C., Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, has not closed any stores. In May, it implemented several changes, including hiring more security guards, closing down secondary entrances, limiting the number of items permitted through self-checkout areas, removing high-theft items from shelves and locking up more products.

“At this particular store, it’s actually worse, not better,” Kress said of the shrink. “And we’ve invested a significant amount of money here, even more security here than any other store.”

This meant more changes were needed, Kress said. Giant’s Alabama Avenue store will soon remove high-theft merchandise such as Tide laundry detergent, Schick razor blades, Dove soap, Degree deodorant and Pantene shampoo to curb losses.

“We have no other choice,” Diane Hicks, senior vice president of operations, said Thursday during a walk-through with officials from the D.C. mayor’s office, the city’s police and fire departments, and the Chamber of Commerce. She added that other nearby stores have locked up all products in those aisles or removed them altogether. “I’ve been leaving it out for our customers, and unfortunately it just forces all the crime to come to us.”

This is a sad state of affairs. No one can afford to be the last store in the neighborhood to lock up certain products because all the thieves quickly learn where to go. But if Giant isn’t able to stop the theft the store will close. It’s the only full-sized grocery store left in Ward 8 which is in the eastern part of the city. That one store currently serves about 80,000 people who live in the ward. If it disappears it’s unlikely anyone else will be eager to open a grocery store in the area.

It should go without saying but none of these people stealing Tide or name brand cosmetics are doing so because they are starving. They are doing this to resell the items online and make money. Store brand laundry detergent just isn’t going to have the same resale value as Tide, at least that is the hope for Giant Food.

According to this local news report published three weeks ago, the store is losing 20% of all sales due to theft, an amount that comes to about half a million dollars. Unless that changes, this store is going to close.