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Andrew Adam Newman

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When Ashley Raymond and Meagan Doyle met in a business class as sophomores at the University of Texas at Austin in 2017, it’s no wonder they had self-defense on their minds. Two students had recently been murdered on the campus: Haruka Weiser in 

“At the time, we really bonded over not feeling safe, particularly around and on campus,” Raymond told Retail Brew. “It came as a big shock to ourselves and others on the campus when these tragedies occurred.”

As part of a class project—along with two other classmates, Danna Tao and Margy McCallum—they came up with a handheld multifaceted self-defense tool, Pocket Punch, that included pepper spray, a flashlight, (nonbrass) knuckles, and an alarm. While they created a 

 and started a company, as the Covid-19 pandemic bore down, they folded it.

In 2021, the foursome—Raymond, Doyle, Tao, and McCallum—formed a new company focused on women’s safety, Safely, with Raymond serving as CEO and Doyle as CMO. Along with a new multifunction defense tool, 

, Safely features a line of pepper sprays, with the replaceable spray fitting into a cylindrical keychain holder.

 as a “compact safety tool that doubles as a cute accessory,” the pepper-spray product comes in colors including “Pretty in Pink” and “Opal Blush.”

Safely's pepper spray products and Sidekick multitool. 

To promote its products and instruct how to use them, Safely stages 

 using practice spray, which substitutes water for pepper spray in the containers. The events, where the target of the spritzes is a pink skeleton named Pinky, are popular at colleges, and are scheduled this fall for campuses including Colorado State University, Texas State University, and the University of San Diego.

Along with its e-commerce site, the products are available at about 90 brick-and-mortar locations, including running stores and campus bookstores, and business over the summer was good, with product orders increasing 157% over the last 90 days, according to the company.

But Safely faces hurdles, too. While nobody would fault the brand’s 

 of empowering women to protect themselves, what makes pepper spray a deterrent is also why states have a panoply of regulations restricting it. The restrictions 

 from outright shipping prohibitions to limiting the size of the containers to the strength of the spray. Citing state laws, Safely currently doesn’t ship pepper spray products to New York, Massachusetts, Alaska, or Hawaii.

Doyle understands the rationale for pepper spray regulations, even if she chafes at some.

“There have to be some sort of restrictions, and it’s not like we don’t understand that piece of it,” Doyle told Retail Brew. “[But] that just seems a little crazy to us when this is a nonlethal product and something that people are so familiar with; the general reaction when we tell people about these restrictions is they just have no idea.”

Beyond shipping, some states strictly regulate where pepper spray products can be sold, which of course limits retail distribution opportunities for Safely. In New York, for instance, pepper spray can only be sold by licensed firearms dealers and pharmacists, although a state senate 

 would remove both that restriction and the one that prohibits shipping pepper spray ordered online.

“As a mother of an 11-year-old daughter who is coming of age, my goal is to make sure that young women and all people really feel safe and secure,” State Senator Jessica Scarcella-Spanton, who sponsored the bill, 

 the New York Post. “I do believe this is something that could help save a life.”

Jake Egbert, inventory buyer for running retailer Fleet Feet’s seven franchise locations in Houston, said that the stores had carried another pepper spray product for years.

“It was this generic pepper spray product that was plain black that did what it was supposed to do, but it didn’t have any kind of colorful marketing or packaging, and it just kind of sat up on the wall,” Egbert told Retail Brew.

The stores switched to Safely products in 2023, after Raymond, a 

“Not that you can make pepper spray really sexy, but I guess you could say they found a way to do that” with “bright colors, good marketing and this infectious positive energy about their startup,” Egbert said.

Egbert estimates that on average the Fleet Feet Houston stores sell 10 times more of the products than the ones they carried previously, in part because the founders’ enthusiasm and marketing efforts inspired him to display Safely products more prominently.

Over the summer, Raymond appeared in a video on Safely’s Instagram account saying that a woman on a run used the brand’s pepper spray to 

 an attacker after attending a training event at Fleet Feet’s Houston location.

“Their willingness to create a safer tomorrow for runners is definitely something you can tell is a top priority for them as a brand,” Egbert said. “They’re passionate.”

Safely CEO Ashley Raymond (left) and CMO Meagan Doyle.

Women’s self-defense startup Safely is winning fans but facing obstacles

Safely pepper-spray products can’t be shipped to consumers in four states.

Why this women’s self-defense startup is winning fans but facing obstacles

“Violent customers throw items, climb on counter at CA Chipotle,” read one headline projected on screens behind the stage. “Tesco arms delivery drivers with DNA ‘spit kits’ to help trace abusive customers amid rise in violence,” read another.

While much of the programming at this year’s NRF Big Show was the standard fare of 

, one panel was a grim reminder of the plight of the retail workforce segment who aren’t usually treated to travel stipends and networking mixers: frontline workers.

The session, in case anyone still prescribed to the bromide that the customer is always right, was called “Tackling customer incivility: 3 approaches to support and empower your frontline associates.”

 that proliferated at the height of the pandemic often featured entitled retail and restaurant customers abusing workers over masking protocols, Carol Leaman, CEO and co-founder of Axonify, a training and onboarding platform geared at frontline workers, said that while the memes may have faded, the despicable behavior has not.

There are about a thousand items in a content library for frontline workers and their managers to access on the Axonify platform, and 8 of the 10 top most popular items today relate to customer incivility and workplace safety, “which is astounding,” Leaman said. “Five years ago, this stuff wasn’t even a thing, and now it’s a very big thing.”

 by Axonify found that 40% of frontline retail and grocery workers report feeling scared of going to work, while a 2024 survey from 

 found that 80% of frontline retail workers felt unsafe at work.

“I think that’s a pretty sad indictment of the world that we live in at the moment,” Martin Newman (no relation to author), a self-described “consumer champion” with The Customer First Group, said during the session.

It’s also, Leaman added, partly why retailers are facing staff 

“I am convinced that some of the labor shortage that we see today in some of these frontline roles is directly related to the risk that these people feel going to work,” Leaman said.

, 63% of frontline respondents said customers have grown more likely in the past few years to ask—yup, this old chestnut—to speak with a manager. Another 60% said customers have grown more irritable than before, while 58% said they’re more likely to start disputes with staff and other shoppers and 55% said they’re more often haggling over prices with associates.

A generation ago, the extent of training for a retail associate might have been how to operate the register and fold clothes 

 for displays, but today more retailers are coaching on how to deal with unhinged customers.

“We are seeing trends of having people expert in conflict resolution be leveraged in stores to train managers, to train associates on how to de-escalate a situation,” Leaman said.

Leaman said she was shopping recently when she saw another shopper struggling to ring up her merchandise in the self-checkout line, and then was “extremely rude” to an associate in his early twenties who approached her to help.

“I thought, ‘He’s been very well-trained,’” she said.

“He just calmly asked her to please give him a moment and he would sort her out” and he resolved the situation, she said.

But maybe the question is not whether store associates need to be retrained as much as shoppers do.

“There’s all manner of situations where people today, for whatever reason, are just far less patient than we used to be,” Leaman concluded. “There’s some grace and some patience and kindness that we’ve lost absolutely.”

Carol Leaman (right) and Martin Newman seated onstage at NRF's Big Show.

Why are 40% of retail frontline workers scared to go to work?

Tackling “customer incivility” at NRF’s Big Show.

The locked display cases proliferating in drug stores and big box stores, as we’ve 

, present a retail conundrum. The purpose of locked cases is to curb shoplifting, but a 

 by Consumer World found that when something they wanted to buy is locked up, fewer than 1 in 3 shoppers (32%) bother to summon an employee to unlock the case; a Retail Brew reader poll found that 

 shoppers bother to summon an associate in that scenario, just 19%. So, if locking up goods apparently scuttles that many sales, is the solution worse than the shoplifting problem it’s meant to address?

Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth didn’t exactly solve that mystery on a recent 

, during which the company reported quarterly losses of 

, but he threw more shade on the locked display cases than you might expect from a company that has installed so many of them.

“When you lock things up,” Wentworth said, speaking extemporaneously in response to the last question of the call from an analyst, “you don’t sell as many of them. We’ve kind of proven that pretty conclusively.”

To address shrink—the catchall term for merchandise that goes missing from warehouses, during transit, from backrooms, and from shoplifting from store aisles—Wentworth said the company is engaged in “hand-to-hand combat battle.” While he gave no specific ways in which Walgreens plans to retreat from or augment its use of locked cases, Wentworth did say he and the company’s head of asset protection had spoken recently and that there are “creative things that we are looking at, both as a company and as an industry, as it relates to the customer experience on shrink.”

Two years ago, on another earnings call in January 2023, James Kehoe, who was then Walgreens CFO, also admitted that the company had 

” shoplifting for why it had closed five stores in San Francisco in 2021, then invested in what Kehoe admitted was “

” too much security in stores, since “security companies are proven to be largely ineffective.”

When it came to shrink, Kehoe said at the time, “maybe we cried too much” about the extent of the problem.

Walgreens CEO says locking up merch hurts sales

“When you lock things up,” Tim Wentworth explained to analysts, “you don’t sell as many of them.”

It’s no secret that consumers are not exactly enthralled by the locked display shelves they’re increasingly encountering in stores. A Consumer World reader poll found 

 shoppers did not bother to summon an associate when an item they were shopping for was locked up; a Retail Brew reader poll found even more, 

, decide not to have a product they’re shopping for unlocked.

What’s been a mystery, however, is how long shoppers typically wait for products to be unlocked, or how common the practice of locking up products has become.

Shoppers wait an average of 7.7 minutes for under-key items to be unlocked, according to data from RDSolutions, the 35-year-old data and analytics firm formerly known as RetailData. The data, which had never been published before being provided to Retail Brew, was conducted on the week that began in September 30 in 626 drug, grocery, and mass-market retailers in the US and Canada.

The longest wait for items to be unlocked was at mass-retailers, where the average wait was 8.6 minutes, followed by grocery stores (7.5 minutes) and drug stores (6.9 minutes). The longest wait was 46 minutes, while in two cases, associates told the researchers (who pose as everyday shoppers) they were too busy to unlock cases.

To account for expensive electronics that were locked up far longer than the recent push to lock up everyday items to prevent shoplifting, RDSolutions’s thousands of incognito shoppers—who already make the rounds to stores to research on behalf of its brand and stores clients—sought only items cheaper than $10 to be unlocked.

As for stores that do lock up items that cheap, they found the practice ubiquitous, with 

of the 203 drug stores it surveyed doing so, followed by 88% of the 176 mass-market retailers, and 72% of the 247 grocery stores.

But why? If as many shoppers abandon a purchase as the aforementioned surveys suggest, and the wait times are so long, isn’t the value of the sales lost due to locked cases higher than the shoplifting losses those cases ostensibly prevent?

Lee Kallman, CCO of RDSolutions, told Retail Brew that one thing that his firm has “heard in various forms and fashions” is that store managers today may “have more incentive to prevent loss than to drive sales.” That, said Kallman, is “a little counterintuitive, but it kind of makes sense for why we’re seeing this.”

Anti-theft locked merchandise on shelves with customer service button at a CVS.

Consumers wait an average of 7.7 minutes for products to be unlocked

RDSolutions visited 626 stores in the US and Canada, and found 85% had locked up items cheaper than $10.

You could say that Joel Bines wrote the book on customer-centric retail approaches, and not just because he’s been a retail consultant for more than two decades, primarily as a managing director at AlixPartners before striking out on his own to form Spruce Advisory in 2023. You also could say it because Bines 

The Metail Economy: 6 Strategies for Transforming Your Business to Thrive in the Me-Centric Consumer Revolution

When the book was published in 2022, Bines 

 Retail Brew that although retailers have always said they put customers first, he had observed that “rarely was the customer even part of the vast majority of the dialogue in boardrooms.”

The book argues that in today’s consumer-centric “metail” paradigm, retail executives should take a lesson from Costco, which makes the hoses on its gas pumps extra long to reach the gas tank even if shoppers pulled in on the wrong side. It’s a convenience apt to delight customers, Bines told us at the time, but it’s also a way to sell more gas, because, “if you come at it from a logistics perspective, you get massively more throughput through the gas lines than you would if you had to have cars backing up and moving around to get on the other side.”

 of locked display cases, which retailers including Target and CVS have installed to curb what they claim is a growing problem of shoplifting rings contributing to stores’ overall merchandise losses (aka “

”), so we wondered if Bines had any thoughts about the practice.

“Is it the right thing for the customer to lock up product?” Bines asked Retail Brew. “One hundred percent no. There’s not a CEO or a retail leader in the world that would say that is customer-friendly.”

One mystery surrounding locked-display cases is how that solution can be better than the problem it ostensibly solves:

When they find that what they’re shopping for is locked up, fewer than one in three shoppers (32%) bother to summon an employee to unlock the case, with 55% of them not buying an alternative in the store but rather shopping elsewhere, according to a 

 were even more stark, with fewer than one in five shoppers (19%) saying they'd summon an employee if something they wanted to buy was locked up; 46.4% said in that circumstance they’d purchase the item online instead, and only 8.5% said they’d buy something similar in the store that wasn’t locked up.

Retailers can track shrink, but often not whether the products even made it to shelves but rather were stolen in warehouses, en route to stores, or from stores’ back rooms. However, thanks to 

 of bands of shoplifters sweeping products off shelves, Bines said an inordinate amount has been attributed to shoplifting.

“Yes, organized theft exists, but it’s much easier to attack a train…than it is to run into 15 CVS’s and grab a bunch of Old Spice,” Bines said.

But even when stores do have high levels of shoplifting, Bines said flummoxing shoppers with locked cases is not the solution.

“We have got to make sure everything we do starts and ends with, ‘What does our consumer want, and how do we give it to them?’ And then we figure out how to make money,” he said.

As for how to address shoplifting in a way that doesn’t also create friction for those without sticky fingers, Bines said one promising solution is letting consumers unlock the cases themselves through store apps on their phones, as CVS is doing in a 

Another option for shoplifting-prone stores, he said, is putting less stock on shelves but restocking more frequently.

“So that if somebody does hit you, they don’t hit you for 24 Mach3 razors, they hit you for two Mach3 razors,” he said. “Because how often does somebody walk into a store and need to buy more than two Mach3 razors at a time?”

His preferred solution: Get rid of the locked cases and hire more associates at those stores, and have those associates circulating as floaters and stockers. Bines wouldn’t task those employees with fighting shoplifting, but just having them visible would act as a “prophylactic” against shoplifting, he said.

 recommend hiring security guards to give shoppers the hairy eyeball, but rather “customer service professionals” to elevate shopping, he said.

“Put more labor in the stores and give your customer a better experience,” Bines said. “And if you give your customer a better experience, all things being equal, they’ll shop with you more and they’ll tell their friends and that store will do better.”

Laundry detergent in a locked display case in a Target. 

Joel Bines says locked display cases are ‘the single most customer unfriendly’ retail strategy

The author of The Metail Economy suggests a theft-prevention measure that shoppers will actually like.

Why Joel Bines says locked display cases are ‘the single most customer unfriendly’ retail strategy

 for the campaign coffers of a presidential campaign, but generally, it’s difficult to see a silver lining when facing legal action. That’s why a new survey about how much litigation corporate lawyers say they’re facing will strike many as about as upbeat as 

The data comes from law firm Norton Rose Fulbright’s (

!) annual survey on litigation trends, and includes in-house and general counsel lawyers from sectors including retail. The firm surveyed more than 400 legal professionals in September 2023.

Asked if they were exposed to more litigation over the past 12 months, lawyers in the retail sector were busiest in two categories:

Retail attorneys were the most likely to say they faced increased cyber and data protection litigation in the past year (57%), as well as regulatory investigations (35%).

As for the outlook for the next 12 months, call it past as prologue:

Retail lawyers were the most likely to expect increased cyber and data protection litigation over the next 12 months (50%), and more employment and labor disputes (40%).

While attorneys for tech companies were the most likely to say they expected increased intellectual property litigation over the next year (42%), attorneys for retail companies were second (36%).

 (ESG) prompted increased litigation among 29% of retail companies in the past 12 months, and 25% of the retail lawyers expected it to keep increasing over the next 12 months.

For the environment specifically, among respondents from all sectors including retail who expected to face more legal disputes in the next 12 months, most (54%) predicted they’d be fueled by allegations related to greenwashing or other false environmental claims, followed by climate change and greenhouse emissions (43%).

Retailers are expecting more litigation this year 

Look for more legal fracases over labor and cyber security. 

Retailers are expecting more litigation this year: survey

In most states, menstrual products—including tampons, pads, sponges, and menstrual cups—are not taxed, either because they’re considered basic necessities that should be tax-free or, in the case of five states, because they have no sales tax.

In recent years there has, fittingly, been a steady flow of states that abolished their tax on period products, with 22 states doing so in the last decade, according to the 

 to eliminate taxes on period products, with its law going into effect on September 1.

But 21 states are still taxing the products, and now eight woman-founded menstrual-hygiene brands have formed the Tampon Tax Coalition to advocate for abolishing the tax in those states, too.

 “First we’ve got to get rid of the sales tax, then we need to make these products more affordable and accessible in public spaces, or at least to those who may be below the poverty line,” Cherie Hoeger, co-founder and CEO of coalition member Saalt—whose product line includes period underwear, menstrual cups, and discs—told Retail Brew.

Saalt is based in Boise, and Idaho is among the states that still tax the products. (When a bill to provide free period products in schools was debated—and defeated—in Idaho’s statehouse in March, Republican Representative Barbara Ehardt said phrases including “period poverty” and “menstrual equity” that arose in the debate were “

As long as the taxes on the products persist in some states, the coalition is vowing to reimburse their customers who’ve paid the tax. Consumers who go to 

 within 10 days of purchase and submit their receipt will be reimbursed via Venmo within 24 hours.

The tax-repayment program is modeled after one another coalition member, August, a self-described “gender-inclusive and sustainable period care brand,” introduced in May. The brand pays the tax itself when customers order from its e-commerce site but devised the Venmo system for those who purchase August products from Target and other retailers that carry them.

Hoeger said Saalt’s e-commerce site charges tax to customers in states that still tax the products, but that it’s working with the coalition to set up its site so that it can proactively pay the tax, too.

One retailer, CVS, is also assuming the tax burden on the products. In October 2022, the company announced it would pay taxes for period products for customers in 12 states, although two—Texas and Virginia—have eliminated the tax since then.

What precluded the company from executing the policy in the dozen or so other states where the products are taxed are laws in those states that prohibit companies from covering a product’s tax, CVS 

At the same time, CVS announced it was dropping prices on its private-label period products by 25%.

 The remaining six members of the coalition are Cora, Diva, Here We Flo, The Honey Pot, Lola, and Rael.

The brands are, to be sure, competitors, but you’re not likely to see a Musk-Zuckerberg-style 

“The way that I view the landscape is anybody who is doing better for the world, who’s providing accessible period care and especially reusable period care, I see them as allies,” Hoeger said. “We really don’t take part in such a competitive patriarchal structure, but instead we say, ‘Hey, we can rally together and do good in the world.

A US map shows, in red, the 21 states still charge a sales a tax on period products.