It is 4:47 on a Tuesday afternoon and a man named Dale has been standing in front of a plexiglass cabinet at a Rexler Drug & Wellness in suburban Ohio for twenty-six minutes, pressing a small gray button that makes a sound somewhere else in the building.
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Behind the plexiglass, in a locked case reinforced with a steel bar and a secondary padlock, are eleven varieties of stick deodorant. Dale wants one of them. He wants the cheap one, the white one, the one that smells like a rental car. He has a job interview in the morning and he has already sweated through the shirt he is wearing to think about the job interview.
The button makes its sound. Nobody comes. Nobody is coming. Six days ago, Rexler corporate eliminated 4,100 positions across 900 stores as part of an operational streamlining initiative, and at this particular location that reduction included Marisol, a 34-year-old shift lead who was, as far as anyone can determine, the only living human being with a key to the deodorant.
The Key Was Never Part Of The Plan
When a drugstore locks up deodorant, it does so on the recommendation of an asset protection department that has never met a customer and does not intend to. Rexler’s shrink-reduction program was designed by a vendor whose software uses AI to identify high-theft categories, and the software identified deodorant, because of course it did. Deodorant is nine dollars now. Everything is nine dollars now.
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The software did not identify staffing, because staffing was a different vendor’s software, and that software had already determined that a store this size can be operated by 1.6 people if one of them is willing to also be the pharmacy.
“The case is working exactly as intended,” said Brett Halvorsen, a regional operations manager who has a standing desk and a wife who does not know what he does. “Zero units of deodorant have left that store without payment. Zero units have left it with payment either, but that’s a separate metric and it lives in a separate dashboard.”
Asked who currently has the key, Halvorsen said the key is a store-level responsibility. Asked who at the store level has it, he said Marisol. Asked whether Marisol still works there, he said no, and then said the word “realistically” three times in a sentence that did not otherwise contain a verb.
Meanwhile, In The Aisle
Word has gotten around. The locked case at the Rexler on Kettering Boulevard has become a small local institution — a place where strangers commiserate. A gig driver in a puffy insulated bag stands beside Dale, checking her phone, because a woman on a delivery app three miles away has ordered one antiperspirant and one bag of gummy melatonin and the app will penalize the driver’s completion rate for a failure the app has no vocabulary to describe.
A woman in athleisure explains to nobody that she doesn’t use conventional deodorant anyway, that she uses a magnesium mist and has “detoxed her pits,” and that the transition takes about six weeks and smells like a compost bin having a nervous breakdown. She is not buying anything. She is here for the community.
The remaining employee, a 19-year-old named Kevin who is currently the pharmacy, the photo counter, and the entire concept of Rexler Drug & Wellness, has been asked to open the case forty times in two days. He has explained forty times that he cannot. He has begun explaining it with a kind of monastic flatness, like a man reciting the only prayer he was ever taught.
At 5:30 the overhead lights step down to their evening setting. Kevin drags a mop bucket past the personal care aisle and works around Dale’s shoes without asking him to move, because Dale has become part of the store, a fixture, a man standing at the glass with his hand on a gray button, waiting to be allowed to smell acceptable to a stranger.