CVS Is Turning Locked Shelves Into an Excuse to Make You Download Its App

CVS is finally willing to unlock the treasures that they have placed behind lock and key—so long as you’re willing to give the company an additional peak into your personal information. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the pharmacy giant is trying out a pilot program that will allow customers to unlock cabinets and shelves via the CVS app.

The program is currently being piloted in three stores as an attempt to ease some of the pain points that customers continue to experience in convenience stores that have grown increasingly inconvenient, requiring people to stand around waiting for an overworked staff member can come open up the deodorant lock box for them. If the trial proves successful, the company is planning on rolling the program out to 10-15 stores, with the ultimate goal of full-scale deployment across the country.

CVS’s new system for allowing customers to unlock common goods that have been put behind plexiglass will operate primarily through the company’s app. People hoping to actually be able to take things off the shelves like they would do in a normal store will have to download the CVS app and sign up for the company’s loyalty program. You’ll have to be logged into the app and connect to the store’s Wi-Fi, then enable Bluetooth connectivity on your device in order to activate the feature that allows you to unlock the cabinets. Shockingly, this is an improvement in convenience.

The introduction of the ability to unlock products in stores, in addition to being the solution to a problem that CVS caused all on its own, is part of a broader effort to shift more people into the CVS app ecosystem, where the company can farm data. The company has been trying to position itself at the center of peoples’ health, and last year it tapped Deloitte Digital to reimagine its mobile app in a way that more efficiently leverages user health information to serve them ads, offers, and just generally keep them locked into CVS.

Per The Journal, the company soon plans to load up the app with AI features, including “a search feature powered by generative AI.” Which is great, surely nothing bad will happen by allowing people to have their health questions answered by a machine known for hallucinating information.

Anyway, shout out to CVS for successfully creating an information loop that results in customers willingly participating in additional surveillance. They created a fake problem (mass retail theft) to lock up their products, inconveniencing customers, just to create a solution to that made-up problem that requires those same customers to hand over their information so their behaviors can be tracked and monetized. Nice little operation they’ve got going over there.