Walgreens and CVS to stop locking up beauty products for women of color
The drugstore chains Walgreens and CVS Health say they will stop locking up beauty and hair care products aimed at black women and other women of color, joining Walmart in ending a practice at some stores that has drawn the ire of customers.
“We are currently ensuring multicultural hair care and beauty products are not stored behind locked cases at any of our stores,” Walgreens said in a statement emailed to the Associated Press late on Thursday.
CVS confirmed its decision in a statement to the Guardian. “We have a firm nondiscrimination policy that applies to all aspects of our business and our product protection measures have never been based on the race or ethnicity of our customers,” the company said. “After reviewing the security measures we have in place for many different products and categories, we are taking steps in our stores to ensure that no hair, beauty or personal care products for communities of color are kept in locked displays or shelving units.”
The company also said it had grown its “textured hair and color categories” by 35% recently, adding new items and brands targeted towards communities of color. It said it was also making a commitment to stocking more blackowned and -founded haircare brands.
Walmart on Wednesday said it would ban the practice, which took place at a dozen of its 4,700 stores and became the focus of a federal discrimination lawsuit filed in 2018 that was dropped a year later.
Walmart is making other major changes, in an effort to curb systemic racism and discrimination. On Thursday, the retailer announced it would stop selling facial recognition technology to US police departments. The practice has drawn severe criticism in the wake of George Floyd’s death and also been brought to an abrupt end by Amazon, Microsoft and IBM this week.
Many stores have had a longstanding policy of locking up items that have high theft rates, such as batteries and razor blades. But experts say that locking up items catering to black customers, particularly in black neighborhoods, is widespread and retailers need to abolish it. They also say that stores lock up more items in black neighborhoods compared with white neighborhoods.
“If you lock up products for black people and you aren’t doing that for products for white customers, that is discriminatory,” said Neil Saunders, managing director at GlobalData Retail. “It is out of step with the times we are
living now.”
Walmart said in a statement that as at other retailers, the locked cases were put in place to deter shoplifters from some products such electronics, automotive, cosmetics and other personal care products. But it said: “We’re sensitive to the issue and understand the concerns raised by our customers and members of the community and have made the decision to discontinue placing multicultural hair care and beauty products in locked cases.”
In 2018, Essie Grundy sued Walmart for locking up beauty items catering to black women. According to the complaint, Grundy went to the Walmart store in Perris, California, several times and had to ask a sales clerk to unlock the display case for black hair and body products. Meanwhile, beauty items for non-black people were not under lock and key, according to the suit. Grundy said she felt “shame and humiliation” as people were staring at her as if she were criminal as she waited for assistance.
That experience is all too familiar for Kendra Bracken-Ferguson, a black digital marketing and social media leader in retail and beauty. She says she gets annoyed by long waits for the sales associates to unlock the beauty and personal care products not just at the local grocer Albertsons but at other neighboring stores in View Park in Los Angeles, known as the “Black Beverly Hills”. She says she doesn’t see those products locked up in Beverly Hills.
Bracken-Ferguson said she has stopped going to stores where this is still practiced.
“It sends a message of being prosecuted as soon as you walk in, disrespected and generalized in a way that is psychologically troubling because it is based on the race of your skin or where you live and nothing more,” she wrote.