Detergent and deodorant, toothpaste, the entire shampoo aisle.

“It’s all locked up,” Corey Potter sighed, describing shelves encased behind security glass at a Target near her Echo Park home. “I hate it.”

Potter recalled once waiting 15 minutes for an employee to unlock a case at another Target location. These days, if she sees several other shoppers waiting for too few frenzied workers, the 30-year-old video editor typically skips items on her list and later does something she doesn’t feel great about: buys more home essentials on Amazon.

“Rather than go to Target and wait,” she said, shrugging, “I’ll just give Daddy Bezos my hard-earned cash.”

Shoplifting is as old as shopping itself. And retailers have long played a game of cat and mouse with thieves, searching for ways to thwart them while still giving paying customers easy access to merchandise.

The true severity and scope of the problem remain an enduring mystery of the free market, as national chains eagerly point to retail theft as a key drag on profits, but are reticent to publicly discuss internal numbers on shrink — the industry term for theft and other types of loss — or specifics of new anti-theft measures. Adding to the murkiness, the issue has become more politicized in recent years as some voters and elected officials in Los Angeles, San Francisco and other city centers clamor for a response to what they see as a worsening problem.

But what is clear to anyone who has shopped at a drug, grocery or home improvement store in L.A. in recent years is that retailers are increasingly resorting to the drastic step of barricading entire swaths of their stores behind lock and key.

Using a tactic once reserved for a few pricey, high-demand items — cold medication, electronics, baby formula and razors to name a few — big chains now routinely lock up almost every type of merchandise. A shopper looking to grab a box of condoms or a $1.99 set of crayons, ointment to remove calluses or a container of instant coffee, now often has no choice but to hit a button to summon a store employee with a key and wait.

Executives focused on their companies’ bottom lines are no happier about taking the drastic step to deter shoplifters. Although they’re in the business of selling as much as possible, they’ve been left to make the seemingly backward calculation that thefts require them to make it harder for paying customers to buy things.

“Locking a product,” a spokesperson for CVS said in an email, “is a measure of last resort.”

Retail theft has become a priority for California leaders in recent years.

In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom sent $267 million to cities and counties to increase arrests and prosecutions of organized retail crimes. A few weeks earlier, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass announced a task force focused on such crimes, following a string of robberies at high-end stores such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent that garnered a flurry of media attention and helped further cement a new phrase into the zeitgeist: A smash-and-grab.

In February, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta filed criminal charges against a woman he called the ringleader of a retail theft group prosecutors say stole nearly $8 million in beauty products to resell on her Amazon storefront. And last week, the coalition behind a tough-on-crime ballot initiative that would roll back the landmark Proposition 47 by stiffening penalties for some retail thefts in California submitted enough signatures that it appears the measure will go before voters in November.

The initiative was bankrolled largely by big chains, including Walmart, Target and Home Depot.

While the companies work publicly to change California law, they are taciturn about discussing their efforts to stop shoplifters, making it hard to quantify how much more merchandise is now locked up and which stores have embraced the strategy.

Representatives for several of the region’s largest retailers — Target, Vons, Rite Aid and CVS — either didn’t respond to requests to discuss internal deliberations on stemming theft or sent brief statements about their anti-theft measures.

David Johnston, vice president of asset protection and retail operations at the National Retail Federation, said that locking up more merchandise is “an unfortunate necessity” to combat theft and what he characterized as a rise in organized retail crime and violent incidents in stores.

Retailers know that the additional supplies and labor needed to lock up more merchandise cut into their bottom line and frustrate customers, Johnston said, but some have decided it’s a necessary trade-off to keep shelves stocked with often-stolen items such as baby formula and medications.

“Right now, the best approach in many instances is putting it behind lock and key,” Johnston said. “These measures are last-ditch efforts.”

Joe Budano, the chief executive of Indyme, a San Diego-based company that makes buttons to beckon sales associates to specific aisles, estimated that frustration over waiting for locked merchandise leads to a 10% to 25% reduction in sales, calling the cages “the bane of retail.”

His company also has developed technology — the Freedom Case, they call it — that allows shoppers to open cases themselves using personal information such as their cellphone number or by scanning their face.

The Freedom Case, technology developed by a San Diego-based company called Indyme, allows shoppers to open locked merchandise themselves using personal information such as their cellphone number.

(Joseph Budano)

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More than 40 retailers are testing the Freedom Case in stores, Budano said, including a national chain he declined to name.

To combat theft, Budano said, companies often scrutinize missing merchandise using individual SKUs, the most granular data possible.

“They know all the way down to which flavor of Oil of Olay is most stolen,” he said. “The pace at which things have gotten locked up tells you the magnitude of the problem.”

But that magnitude — which retail industry groups say has reached “unprecedented” and “epidemic” levels, despite data showing such characterizations are overblown — varies by city.

The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan research organization, tracked shoplifting trends in 24 cities from 2019 to the middle of 2023 and found that rates were down in more than two-thirds of the cities. New York City and L.A. were the two biggest exceptions, logging increases of 64% and 61%, respectively.

Even in light of the recent surge in L.A., the rate of reported shoplifting incidents in L.A. County in late 2022 was slightly lower than it had been 2014, according to a report from the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank that analyzed state Department of Justice statistics. During that eight-year period, only three of the state’s 15 most populous counties — all in the San Francisco Bay Area — saw increased rates of shoplifting, a misdemeanor crime defined as stealing goods valued at less than $950.

The report’s author, Magnus Lofstrom, said that rates of reported shoplifting dropped in much of the state, including L.A. County, when stores emptied out during the 2020 shutdowns. But the region saw a steady rise in the summer of 2021, he said, and by late 2022, the most recent data at the time of his report, the rate was at least 10% above the pre-pandemic level.

In recent months, several companies, including the 99 Cents Only chain and Target, have cited theft or shrink as a reason that factored into their decisions to shutter locations.

Charis Kubrin, a professor of criminology at UC Irvine who studies retail theft, said that although some stores lock up lots of merchandise, others cage almost nothing.

“It’s kind of an uneven distribution,” she said. “A mixed bag.”

A Times analysis from 2022 found that stores in higher-income areas locked up fewer items even in places where property crime rates were higher, creating an additional burden for shoppers in certain neighborhoods. And inconsistencies in how locked merchandise is released to customers — sometimes workers hand you items to put in your cart, other times they escort merchandise to the register — raise the same questions of racial profiling that have long plagued retail establishments.

“The owners and employees have wide-scale discretion,” Kubrin noted.

Security devices at Walgreens are designed to slow down shoplifters.

(Hugo Martin / Los Angeles Times)

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The scale of merchandise theft, Kubrin added, is sometimes overblown by a retail industry happy to pin its problems, which include market forces such as inflation and a shift to online shopping, on stolen merchandise.

Crime, she acknowledged, is part of the equation. As a consumer, Kubrin distilled her frustration with locked merchandise down to the same word many other shoppers used: “Annoying.”

A man posted on TikTok recently that CVS was treating a bag of Werther’s Original caramel candies like a controlled substance and on Reddit someone said the anti-theft measures should force an entire genre of retailer to rebrand themselves:

“Inconvenience store.”

In interviews with five employees at retail locations across the Southland, workers said rushing to unlock merchandise for often-peeved customers has made their slammed shifts more hectic.

“I apologize a lot and I get yelled at a lot,” said a supervisor at a Vons in Pasadena.

But several workers said they understood their employers’ decisions, noting that around late 2021 or early 2022, they’d noticed an uptick in people putting multiples of a single piece of merchandise into big bags and walking out — boosters, as they call shoplifters they suspect will resell the merchandise.

The criminal complaint filed by Bonta’s office this year included text messages suggesting that the defendants, who prosecutors say targeted beauty retailers Ulta and Sephora, used that method.

“I’m not stealing regular I’m going to start filling up my bag quick,” one defendant wrote. “I want to know stuff I can grab.”

Rogelio Madrigal, a shift supervisor at a CVS in San Pedro, started 16 years ago and has noticed changes through the years.

There was a time, he said, when the main thing they locked up was Sudafed. Eventually, items such as Plan B and razors got added and then, a couple years ago, he noticed more people swiping Tide Pods. Now, he mainly sees people walk out with boxes of diapers and cosmetics.

Laundry detergent items are stored in the Freedom Case.

(Joseph Budano)

“It was happening before,” he said, “but not as bad as now.”

On a recent morning at a Rite Aid in East Hollywood, the lone cashier greeted customers who walked through a doorway lined with security alarm panels.

“Welcome in,” he said.

Many of the aisles were lined with anti-theft mechanisms, including red magnets at the end of metal prongs holding items like eyelash curlers and an individual plastic cage around a $22 box of lice treatment. Some sections, including all the toothpaste and most of the detergent, were locked behind long, clear cages.

A customer steadying himself with a cane peeked through a cage at a bottle of Tide and shrugged, settling instead on a small container of Persil, one of the few non-caged detergents, before walking to the register.

At a nearby Vons, the greeting cards and candy were out on shelves, but an assortment of school supplies, including a ruler for $1.47, was locked up.

In the medication aisle, a woman with a full cart sighed when she realized that one of the last items she needed — a small bottle of Claritin, an allergy medication — was locked up. She pressed the button and an automated refrain that, during busy hours, rings out like the store’s soundtrack played: “Thank you, someone will be with you shortly.”

Less than a minute later, when a worker with a key ring rounded the corner, her eyes widened in surprise.

“That was fast!” she told him.

“We try,” he said.

TikTok on Wednesday faced a formidable threat to its business, with a new law signed by President Biden that could dramatically change the way the popular video app operates.

TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has faced scrutiny from U.S. government officials over how it handles the data of its users here as well as its ties to China. The new law would require ByteDance, a tech company founded in China in 2012, to sell TikTok or the app will be banned in the U.S.

In a statement, TikTok said it has invested billions of dollars to protect the data of its U.S. users and that a ban would “devastate seven million business and silence 170 million Americans.”

The social media app, which has a large presence in Culver City, is a key platform for influencers, musicians and Hollywood talent.

“This unconstitutional law is a TikTok ban, and we will challenge it in court,” TikTok said in a statement. “We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail.”

Now that Congress has voted to ban TikTok, how soon could a sale occur?

The law requires ByteDance to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations in 180 days or face a ban . If the Biden administration grants an extension, ByteDance could have a year to sell .

This isn’t the first time the app has faced such a threat. The company confronted a similar fate four years ago when the Trump administration banned it in the U.S.

TikTok sued the federal government, arguing that a ban would violate free speech. Ultimately, the order was blocked by two federal courts, which ruled the administration had exceeded its authority.

“It’s obviously a disappointing moment, but it does not need to be a defining one,” TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew said in a video posted on X on Wednesday. “It’s actually ironic because the freedom of expression on TikTok reflects the same American values that make the United States a beacon of freedom.”

Any sale of TikTok would also need the approval of the Chinese government.

How valuable is TikTok and who might buy it?

The most valuable aspect of TikTok is its algorithm, which surfaces videos that aim to consistently attract the attention of its users in the U.S.

“TikTok’s ability to serve up relevant and entertaining content to its users is unparalleled in the social media world,” Jasmine Enberg, a principal analyst with insights provider Emarketer, said in a statement.

Enberg noted that U.S. users spend 54 minutes on TikTok each day, compared with 35 minutes a day on Instagram’s app.

If ByteDance sells TikTok with its algorithm — which is unlikely — the platform would be worth $100 billion. Without the algorithm, TikTok would have a valuation of $30 billion to $40 billion, said Daniel Ives, a managing director with Wedbush Securities.

The most likely bidders? Computer software giants Microsoft and Oracle, analysts said.

“This would be a major strategic asset that would enable these tech stalwarts to have a massive consumer platform,” Ives said. “Data is gold, and TikTok would be like finding a gold mine for a tech stalwart.”

Microsoft declined to comment. Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Microsoft in August 2020 had explored taking control of TikTok in the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Australia, which would have helped the company expand its presence in social media. But in September 2020 Microsoft said that ByteDance had rejected its offer.

Instead, then-President Trump outlined a framework of a deal in 2020 that involved Oracle and Walmart, in which Oracle would host TikTok’s U.S. user data and TikTok would have a commercial partnership with Walmart. That transaction never materialized.

Other investors have also shown interest. Former Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin, who heads Liberty Strategic Capital, in March said he is assembling an investor group to bid for TikTok, telling CNBC, “This should be owned by U.S. businesses.”

TikTok will attract interest from other private equity players as well, Ives said.

What about Triller?

Triller, an L.A.-based social media company that attracted a lot of influencers to its app in 2020, had previously attempted to acquire TikTok with Centricus Asset Management.

But that deal was never consummated and Triller experienced its own legal issues. Earlier this month, Hong Kong financial services company AGBA Group Holding Ltd. said it planned to acquire Triller in a reverse merger.

“Triller is reviewing all options at this time to secure its position as the leading social video platform in the U.S.,” Triller Chief Executive Bobby Sarnevesht said in a statement.

Could Google or Meta acquire TikTok?

That’s unlikely. Google, which owns YouTube, and Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, are already big leaders in the digital advertising and social media space and could face significant antitrust concerns if they were to attempt to buy TikTok.

Both tech giants also already have their own competing products to TikTok and stand to benefit if the video app were to go away, or if influencers were to encourage their massive audiences to follow them on other platforms.

“The clock is already ticking, and any potential buyer must have deep pockets and a strong stomach,” Enberg of EMarketer said. “While many would want to get their hands on TikTok’s coveted algorithm, most of those who could afford to buy the app wouldn’t be able to clear antitrust hurdles.”

So what would a ban mean for the creator economy in L.A.?

Los Angeles is ground zero for TikTok content creation in the U.S., with huge numbers of full-time creators calling the city home and droves of influencers regularly flying in from around the world to film videos and attend industry events.

Communities and mini economies have formed around TikTok influencers, who employ talent managers, agents, stylists and personal assistants, and start their own businesses related to their fandom.

Many creators have become overnight sensations and near-instant millionaires, banding together to rent mega-mansions and spending lavishly on cars, clothes and products — and encouraging their huge follower bases to do the same.

They have enormous influence on trends and purchasing decisions. Take, for example, Erewhon: After TikTokkers made its Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie a thing, thousands of consumers poured into the luxury grocery chain’s stores to buy the $19 pink drink.

“The amount of money creators are spending on travel, on products, on creating brands — there’s just so much that’s tied to this app,” said Michelle York, 40, a lifestyle and beauty creator from Moorpark, Calif.

With 203,000 followers on TikTok, she quit her job as an executive at an insurance and technology firm last month after discovering that she was earning more money from the app. If TikTok is banned, “the blowback I think will be astronomical,” York said. “And also the financial losses.”

OAKLAND — The first commercial hydrogen fuel station for big-rig trucks in the U.S. is up and running at the Port of Oakland, a baby step toward what hydrogen proponents see as a clean new future for long-haul trucking.

The small station, now serving 30 hydrogen fuel-cell trucks, could mark the start of a nationwide network for fuel-cell truck refueling. It could also flop.

The challenges are immense. Hydrogen fuel is expensive — as much as four times more expensive than gasoline or diesel fuel. The fuel cells, which drive electric motors to drive the truck, are enormously expensive as well.

Making hydrogen itself is now a dirty, greenhouse-gas-generating process, although green hydrogen production is an emerging option, and even more expensive. Hydrogen proponents are banking on the idea that scaling up production will bring prices down

New diesel truck sales will be outlawed in California by 2036. Only zero-tailpipe-emission new trucks will be allowed. Already, zero-emission requirements are in place for trucks that enter ocean ports. And only two technologies are available to achieve that goal: battery electric trucks and hydrogen fuel-cell trucks. “We believe a good portion of those will be hydrogen vehicles,” said Matt Miyasato, chief of public policy for hydrogen fuel distributor FirstElement Fuel.

FirstElement, through its True Zero brand fueling stations, is the largest hydrogen vehicle fuel distributor in the U.S. Miyasato spoke Tuesday at a ceremony to mark the station’s opening, attended by state officials including Liane Randolph, chair of the California Air Resources Board; and Tyson Eckerle, clean transportation advisor for Gov. Gavin Newsom’s business development office, Go-Biz. Primary funding for the Oakland station is provided by state money channeled through the Air Resources Board and the California Energy Commission.

A hydrogen pump at FirstElement’s True Zero hydrogen fueling station at the Port of Oakland.

(Russ Mitchell / Los Angeles Times)

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Hydrogen fuel holds great promise for cleaner air. It is not a fossil fuel. A fuel cell is a kind of battery that takes in hydrogen and emits only water vapor.

However, producing hydrogen itself can be very dirty. Most hydrogen produced today requires methane, which is a fossil fuel and a strong greenhouse gas contributor. The industry is working on production alternatives, including carbon capture and storage from the burning of methane, or quitting methane altogether to make green hydrogen, using an electrolyzer to split water’s hydrogen and oxygen. Both alternatives are prohibitively expensive without government subsidies.

The federal government is handing out $8 billion to jump-start what it calls the “hydrogen economy” by creating so-called hydrogen hubs. One of them will be set in California, which is expected to take in $1.2 billion for the project.

Eckerle said the hub funding will allow construction of 60 more hydrogen truck stations in California, enough to serve 5,000 trucks and 1,000 buses.

The vehicles themselves are expensive too. Both battery electric and hydrogen fuel-cell trucks can cost three times as much or more than a $120,000 diesel truck. Those buying the trucks can qualify for state and federal subsidies to make up most of the upfront costs.

Battery electric is gaining a strong foothold in the medium-sized delivery truck market, but hydrogen could have a leg up for long-haul trucking. While a fuel cell is comparable in size to a diesel engine, a battery big enough for long-haul trucks adds weight and size and cuts down on the total freight load the truck can deliver. And while an battery electric truck can take hours to recharge, the refill time for hydrogen is more comparable to filling up with diesel fuel.