Best Buy does it. Target does it. Circuit City does it. Walmart tends to keep them behind glass cases, and to an extent, the bookstore I work at does that too. The difference is that when Walmart puts DVDs out on a floor display, they’re generally not “keepered.” The bookstore I work at – and our Big Box Competitor — does, generally, not do that: when stuff is on the shelf, where customers can browse, it is – depending, of course, on the price point – keepered and spiderwrapped.

“Keepering” is the rather general term used to describe placing DVDs and CDs into plastic cases which are weighed down with anti-theft devices and are difficult to break without damaging the product inside. Of course, if all you care about is the CD inside the CD case inside the keeper, you probably don’t care if you break the CD’s case … but if you want to resell it, you sure do. The idea, basically, is to prevent an additional obstacle to shoplifting. This despite the fact that we’ve got a Loss Prevention staff made up of both “visible” and “non-visible” (i.e., store detectives) employees. Really, it’s amazing anything ever gets stolen.

(Insert laugh).

“Spiderwrap” is an anti-theft device which is used for oversized (non-standard) items that won’t fit in a keeper. Essentially, when fitted onto an item, it has a small USB-drive shaped device on one side, and a round bulging disc on the front, with plastic-wrapped wire straps holding it in place. Essentially, imagine a wrapped present with an unbreakable ribbon, and you’re picturing a spiderwrap.

It’s one thing to stock the shelves with keepered items. Because the cases are uniform and – here’s an important part – flat, you can actually get the shelves to look reasonable attractive despite their presence, which, to me, kind of serves as if to say, “We suspect you to be a shoplifter.” That, however, is completely impossible with the spiderwraps: with the bulky protrusions, and the wires underneath the boxes which prevent them from sitting without rolling to one side or the other, shelves stocked with spiderwrapped products look particularly disorganized, and unattractive.

If there’s a bright side to a keeper, it’s that because it is clear plastic it’s still possible to read the material on the CD or DVD case: you can see the box art, you can read the description on the back. This is impossible with a spiderwrap: if you put the disc on the front, the art is largely obscured. Put it on the back, and the description is illegible. Not a problem if a customer has already seen The Illusionist three times and just wants to buy it because it’s on sale, or if he’s never seen Harry Potter & The Order of the Phoenix but he’s seen the other movies and read all the books: but if he’s never seen Sunshine, and all he’s got to base his decision making on is the artwork, will he?
Keepering and the various forms thereof has been on my mind because a bulk of my working time Sunday was spent pulling DVDs out of the glass case, spiderwrapping them or unspiderwrapping them depending on their price point, and then trying to fit them onto the shelves with the product already out there. The company decided that having large amounts of inventory inside those glass cases really served very little point, and I tend to agree with them – people want to touch what they’re thinking about buying. Locking stuff away behind glass doors discourages people from spending money.

So, I spent several hours Sunday sitting Indian-style on the floor in Music, with a box of spiderwraps on the floor next to me, and a cart of DVDs in front of me, wrapping them. No one had shown me how to tighten them properly – or even that they could be tightened/expanded, heck, often times, I can’t even get them open at the register so I hack away at them with scissors until the spiderwrap cuts – so I had quite a fun time. I had a whole box of “Medium” spiderwraps – or so I thought, as they all were marked with a sticker which bore only one symbol: a letter M. Turns out, it stands for magnetic.

Anyway, I hate spiderwraps. Hate them, hate them, hate them.