Woketivists Protest to Try and Force Walgreens Into Keeping Stores in High-Crime Parts of Boston Open
“What is your obligation? What is your expectation as a corporate citizen to do what’s right for those communities beyond what’s right just for your bottom line?”
Walgreens has been one of the more prominent retailers to go on record in noting the crime factors that were involved in the closures of many of their stores across the country.
For instance, in 2021 after the closure of 17 stores in the San Francisco area, a spokesman noted that “retail theft across our San Francisco stores has continued to increase in the past few months to five times our chain average” and that “organized retail crime continues to be a challenge.”
That and other types of crimes still continue to be a challenge, especially in other Democrat-run cities like Boston, which over the last year has had three Walgreens locations close with another one set to close at the end of the month.
Since all of the locations were located in low-income parts of Beantown where crime is typically a bigger issue, left-wing activist–or woketivists, as I call them–have accused Walgreens of corporate greed and putting people over profit while subtly implying that racism is also at play, demanding they keep the Roxbury store that is set to close at the end of the month open:
“How are they supposed to get their medicine?” asked Janice Smith, a longtime customer.
It’s sparking concern and outrage from residents who rely on the Warren Street drugstore in this predominantly Black neighborhood.
“What happens to our seniors and our single parents that have nowhere to get to a Walgreens or another pharmacy anywhere near their homes?” said Reverend Miniard Culpepper. “And so we think it’s insensitive – it’s unjust.”
CBS News‘ liberal bias was on full display in their report, asking the Reverend “why he thinks Walgreens is targeting black and brown communities”:
Walgreens said they’re downsizing, but Rev. Culpepper believes it’s nothing short of greed. When asked why he thinks Walgreens is targeting Black and Brown communities, Culpeper said, “I think because they don’t get any pushback. But they’re now getting pushback.”
Michael Curry, who is described as a “healthcare advocate” and used to lead the local NAACP, said it was a question of whether or not Walgreens was willing to look at something other than their “bottom line”:
“What is your obligation? What is your expectation as a corporate citizen to do what’s right for those communities beyond what’s right just for your bottom line,” he asked.
Boston’s WCVB reported on one of the protests:
A group called Communities of Color for Health Equity, a coalition of concerned residents, gathered to protest the closing of the Walgreens pharmacy at 416 Warren Street in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood.
[…]
The group of organizers hand-delivered a letter to the Walgreens area corporate office in Marlborough, Massachusetts on Tuesday, demanding Walgreens delay the closure.
“Let’s work out a plan,” Culpepper said. “Let’s work out a realignment that’s a win-win for everyone.”
The Boston Globe noted that the group has said they’ll travel to Walgreens HQ in Chicago if they need to in order to try and shame them into keeping the location open.
Fascinatingly, they also reported that elected officials at both city and state levels have also tried to step in to temporarily prevent the closure of the store–and the opening of new Walgreens locations–until more voices can be heard:
City and state officials have also joined in the effort. Last year, city Councilors Tania Fernandes Anderson and Brian Worrell filed a resolution calling for Walgreens to postpone both closures and openings of new pharmacies in Boston until further notice, so the council could have an opportunity to weigh in.
The resolution stalled in a committee, but Fernandes Anderson, who represents Roxbury, said she plans to soon file a request for a hearing, to collect community concerns and get answers from the drugstore.
“Walgreens is sending communities of color to other locations without understanding the ramifications,” Fernandes Anderson said. “We’re not going to let corporations go in and out of the city and treat the residents of Boston this way.”
[…]
On a frigid Saturday afternoon, more than 30 customers, clergy, and elected officials gathered outside the drugstore to protest its approaching closure, waving white signs reading “Hell no, Walgreens.”
This is a new and disturbing frontier in anti-capitalist leftism: trying to force stores to stay open when they aren’t profitable and/or are dangerous for employees and customers, all in the name of wokeness.
Here’s an idea: Instead of blaming Walgreens for feeling like they have no option but to close stores in low income areas in big cities across America, maybe residents and other “community leaders” should wake up and take it up with the elected officials who they put into office in the first place, and let them know they will no longer accept the city’s (and state’s) soft-on-crime approach. And then they need to turn around and elect people who have the cajones to actually do what needs to be done to combat the crime issues rather than coddle the offenders.
Until then, stores will continue to close because at the end of the day if a business is losing money and its employees and customers feel unsafe, store owners don’t have much of a choice other than to cut their losses and move on.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Dear Rev. Culpepper:
We are a business. Not a charity.
-s-
T G Grizzly
CEO, Walgreens
Dear Rev. Culpepper:
Put up a bond to indemnify our losses from your organizations funds.
-s-
Fluck off rev, no one really likes you anyway.
Typically outrageous, hypocritical and infantile behavior from stupid, black Dhimmi-crats. If the Reverend was an honest person, he’d take ownership of the situation and express regret for his participation in it, because it is black clergy’s and “activists’ ” vociferous agitprop — parroted and amplified by the Dhimmi-crat Party, at-large — that has created a climate that is totally inhospitable and unprofitable for businesses to operate in, and then, rather than taking responsibility for the predictably destructive consequences of their soft-on-crime political agitation, they blame the businesses for refusing to act as “reparations” repositories handing out tens of millions of dollars worth of free goodies and merchandise to the local miscreants and shoplifters “of color,” who, it must be noted, comprise the vast majority of criminals engaging in this behavior, in urban areas.
The Dhimmi-crats undermine public safety and civil order by coddling and enabling criminals, via vilification of and underfunding of police forces; by engaging in lax, kid gloves prosecution of those few criminals who actually are arrested and charged; and, by imposing absurdly lenient sentences for the even fewer criminals who are convicted of the charges.
When it comes to the shoplifting epidemic, thieves know full-well that the Dhimmi-crat Party has their back. “Social justice” dogma demands that criminals “of color” be treated as alleged victims, rather than as individuals who are responsible for their actions and choices, and, who deserve punishment.
guyjones:
You stated, “If the Reverend was an honest person, he’d take ownership of the situation…”
Allow me to expand on this briefly. If the collectivist/statist/totalitarian/authoritarians of the Dem-wing were not complete flaming hypocrites, they would LITERALLY take ownership of the situation…to wit, the store itself. Raise the money, buy the franchise, and actually attempt RUN A BUSINESS. They don’t like the fact that since they’ve basically legalized theft that a business cannot make a profit in that location but they are utterly unwilling to actually DO something about it. Instead they whinge, and cry, and moan, and expect someone else to do their bidding.
Heck, they can re-name it “The People’s Pharmacy” and indulge in their charity right up until they inevitably run out of money.
Back in the dim and distant past, the long-ago, when Peanuts was funny, Schulz ran a 4-panel strip with Linus talking to Charlie Brown. I remember it going like this:
Linus: “When I grow up I want to be a great philanthropist.”
CB: “To be a great philanthropist you have to make a lot of money.”
There’s a pause as Linus thinks this over for a panel, and then says,
Linus: “I want to be a great philanthropist with other people’s money.”
Pretty much sums up the left-wing in this country.
“… when Peanuts was funny.”
Yes. Back in the time when the strip was about some little kids, and Snoopy was just a dog.
The one I often remember is Linus saying He has decided that when he grew up he wanted to be a wild eyed fanatic.
Mine was Schroeder’s reply when asked how he could possibly play complex pieces when the black keys were only painted on:
“I practice a lot “
All valid points. I agree that the black community taking literal ownership of the store is a potential solution (though unlikely to happen, for the reasons that you articulate), but, even barring that lofty outcome, at a minimum, simply take ownership for the predictably deleterious consequences wrought by your misguided, foolish and self-destructive agitprop, and, concede that your stance was wrong and that it wrought a bad outcome for the black community — that’s all that I ask of the reverend and his complaining ilk.
The dishonesty of the black community and its leaders, and, their stubborn/myopic refusal to connect the dots between the idiotic social policies that they loudly support, and, the real-world harms that those policies produce/inflict, are simply galling and infuriating.
One could say that they WERE taking ownership of the store, one piece of merchandise at a time. The difference being that they would never have any intention of using money.
“Raise the money, buy the franchise, and actually attempt RUN A BUSINESS.”
When leftists try to run businesses lefty style, it often doesn’t work out.
Panera’s Utopic Pay-What-You-Want Restaurant Dream Is Dead
Anti-capitalist ‘pay what you can’ café in Toronto closes after one year in business
New York’s Only “Pay What You Feel” Restaurant Closes
Saying goodbye to EAT Café: Philly’s first pay-what-you-can restaurant to close
You know that saying about “Some people learn from the mistakes of others?”
None of these people are those people.
Want to bet on the odds pedo joe and his pedophile team wouldn’t use tax dollars to bail out the The People’s Pharmacy?
I was born with and grew up around an attitude that, through my nearly 60 years of observation, seems to manifest itself in about 92% of the black population, 83% latino, 67% native American and 18% of the current white population of blaming others for the result of their own behavior. Noticing that disparity makes me racist. So be it.
I think your Latino figure is high. The LULAC and Mecha crowd gripe and snively, but from what I can see, most of the Latino folks are too busy working and raising families to have time for that nonsense.
These Massachusetts liberals are sickening. Around year one AF (Anno Floyd) the members of the largest Boston area road cycling club became consumed with attracting black members and sponsoring social Justice cycling events. The members were almost exclusively white living in $2 million plus houses in tony suburbs. The sport entails buying at least a $7,000 bike and taking most of a weekend day off to ride 50 or 60 miles. For 2 years they accused each other of racism for having almost no black members. This group of highly educated professionals hasn’t a clue how asinine they are.
Paraphrasing a headless queen of history…… “Let them ride bikes”…..
And yet a lot of people here get all in a tizzy because Sheldon Whitehouse’s rich people’s beach club happened not to have any black members at some point a few years ago (perhaps it still doesn’t have any). I mean sure, it’s fun to mock him for it because he’s such a woke piece of ****, but it seemed to me that some people on our side actually seriously believed that it was a club that excludes black people, so his continued membership was a sign of closet racism on his part, which was just not true.
And you’re trying to make what point? That we shouldn’t hold that woke piece of garbage to his own declared standards?
No, just that we should remember that they are his standards, and we’re just having fun at his expense, and we shouldn’t start thinking that the jabs we’re taking at him are actually fair and correct. Mock him all you like, he deserves it, but don’t make the mistake of falling for our own mockery.
Like people who seriously believe that 0bama mistook the number of states. It’s fun to claim he did, so long as we remember that fun is all it is.
“We demand that Walgreens give us stuff for nothing!!!”
Fortunately they have no leverage over Walgreens.
Nor over the already-dying CVS, or Kroger, or [insert national grocery chain here] or Walmart or…
Reverend Culpepper,
You should preach thou not shalt steal before you speak of others being forced into charity.
Dear entitled thieves: The rest of the customer base is sick of paying higher prices so you can steal rather than pay like the rest of us.
Easily fixed. The social justice crowd can insure that underprivileged folks have a place to shop by understanding that it goes two ways, and if they put some of that energy into helping prevent shoplifting they might be able to convince stores to stay open.
My thought exactly. Instead of standing around picketing the stores, they could break down into smaller groups and nab the shoplifters as they exited.
A pretty cod set of odds says at least some of the picketers have shoplifted.
Nabbing them is one thing, but unless kinetic street justice is administered on the spot it’s peeing into the wind.
Chicago Mayor is proposing government grocery stores because the private ones are leaving due to theft. Should work great as the Government has shown they have no compunctions in arresting and/or shooting people.
As long as it’s only Shitcongo taxpayers funding them, that could make a very interesting experiment.
Suck it, ghetto rats.
They go on and on about hating capitalism and wanting minority owned businesses. If Walgreens is a bunch of cooperate racists buy the building and run it yourself.
They won’t do that because they don’t want to know exactly how wrong they are about business and the people they are dealing with in these “communities”.
More like after a legitimate business is forced into shutting down operations due to lack of adequate police funding, the lefties that run the city will double down on stupid acquire the property and convert to safe needle injection site for homeless junkies.
Chicago was talking about opening city run grocerie stores in places that Walmart and some other grocer had given up on. This is how they get to full on nationalizing things. Once you start a city run grocer you can’t close it no matter how bad the losses are. The left will scream “You are killing people if you close these city stores.”
Reardon Metal and the Preservation of Livelihood Law comes to mind.
How can there be a “win-win” when it’s only a win for crime? Oh, I’m sorry… “unilateral wealth transfer”.
Dial 911 and leave message at the tone, the police have been defunded.
More black looting for reparations? How’s that defunding the police working out for black neighborhoods?
BLM is smiling.
Would “forcing” a store to remain open be a “taking” under the 5A or “involuntary servitude” under the 13A? (Asking for a friend.)
Forcing it to remain open would be a taking. Constitutional, but must be compensated at fair market value. If the people who work there all decided to find jobs elsewhere, and you forced them to stay, that would be involuntary servitude.
I would not consider that a “taking” in any way. The government (neither state nor federal) has any power to force a business to STAY open. A “taking” is an instantaneous event, not an ongoing process that the government could extend out to forever. A “taking” is the seizure of an asset, not the forcing of one to engage in ongoing private commerce.
The courts have recognized partial takings, where the government doesn’t seize an asset outright, but significantly reduces its value. Saying “It remains your store, but you can’t close it” takes away an important aspect of ownership, so it’s at least a partial taking. But it’s not involuntary servitude so long as everyone who works there is free to quit. If everyone quits the owner can say “The store is still in business, but nobody showed up for work today so the doors are closed, just as they are overnight or during a stocktake; as soon as we can hire someone to open it and work there it’ll be open to customers.”
But if the owner himself can’t quit, that is involuntary servitude.
Forcing you to engage in commerce is not “[taking] away an important aspect of ownership”. The government is not TAKING anything. It’s FORCING something. Those are two very different concepts.
Yes, the part that devalues your property because of this illegal government dictat is, itself, a taking, but that is only a very minor part of the story, here. It is the order by the government that you must be engage in business, whether you like it or not, that is plainly and clearly illegal. The devaluation of the property due to this illegal order is inconsequential in this circumstance, really.
This is not a taking, it’s a forcing. It is, in the end, slavery.
LOL. And you really believe that the same government that would issue a dictat to that owner that he MUST keep his store open and in business would accept that explanation? That owner would find every state and municipal agency up his rear, with fines going out to infinity, along with several indictments alleging all sorts of crimes, from lying to the government to some sort of illegal tax scheme to what have you.
If the government entity does not accept, “I’m closing MY store because the area is dangerous and I am being stolen from so much that I am losing money.” then it’s certainly not going to accept some sad tale about not being able to hire people to work there, and I doubt the government is then going to write a weekly check to the owner for the taking of the “lost business” – the business that the owner said only lost money for every moment of operation.
The owner is a corporation, and doesn’t do any work. Involuntary servitude means literally compelling an actual human person to perform actual work, not compelling a corporation to conduct business it would rather not.
Even if the owner were a natural person, forcing him to keep the store open would not be involuntary servitude so long as he isn’t personally working there.
How is it illegal? Cast your mind back to the 0bamacare case; the 0bama government’s original argument for its constitutionality was that it was rooted in Congress’s authority to regulate interstate commerce. The Supreme Court rightly rejected that argument, saying that the commerce clause only authorizes Congress to ban or regulate existing commerce, not to order people to engage in commerce they don’t want to. But that applies only to Congress, not to the states. State legislatures are not limited to enumerated powers. They can indeed order people to engage in commerce, which is why Romneycare was constitutional.
Any enforcement would have to go through the courts, which presumably would accept such a defense and require the government to show that it was untrue, that there were employees willing to work there but the owner refused to assign them there despite having been paid compensation for the taking.
BarkyCare is un-Constitutional in myriad ways. Everyone knows that. Benedict Roberts made a sick mockery of logic and law in his BarkyCare “it’s definitely NOT a tax; it definitely IS a tax; the federal government can do anything under the guise of taxation” decision.
1. That is just not true. You are telling lies. The decision is well reasoned, and it does not say anything even remotely like what you claim it said. Did you ever bother reading it?
2. In any case, that’s irrelevant. The point is that it said failure to engage in commerce is not itself commerce, and thus Congress’s power to regulate commerce does not allow it to compel people to buy something they don’t want. So if we were discussing Congress rather than a state, then it could not compel a business to stay open, at least not under the commerce clause; it would have to find some other enumerated power to do it under.
But state legislatures are not limited to enumerated powers (unless their state constitutions say they are). State don’t need a “commerce clause” or any other clause, because they have the inherent power to make any law they like, except those the constitution specifically forbids. So there’s no reason a state couldn’t compel people to buy broccoli, or insurance, or anything else. Which is why Romneycare is constitutional. And therefore there is no reason a state couldn’t compel an owner to keep a store open. But it can’t compel him, or anyone else, to work there.
Eminent domain invoked for an easement would like a word.
That is seizing [the use} of an asset, which is the general idea I was addressing. Certain zoning changes are takings, too, even if the courts like to pretend otherwise.
Simple fix. Make it illegal to quit and the punishment is working there. Then with just a little “due process” your good to go.
Making it illegal to quit is the very definition of involuntary servitude.
So doesn’t that apply to forcing the owner to keep running the business? What if he wants to quit?
He is not being forced to work there, just to keep the business open. (And that’s completely ignoring the fact that the owner is a corporation, which by definition doesn’t do any work and physically can’t be made to do any, so it can’t be enslaved.)
One technique that the authorities could try would be keep this store open or we will cancel the business licenses for the stores that you are leaving open. A nasty way of doing it, and probably not within the letter of the law, but there it is.
Please, Lord, let me be the one tapped upon to call this bluff!
I can’t see the store owners having a problem with that. If the community is a net loss to them why leave any stores open there at all?
Sooner or later the authorities run out of stores to abuse, people have difficulty getting their meds, and the authorities become ex-authorities.
It’s a problem because the stores they’re not closing are presumably profitable.
But I don’t think they could do that without compensating them for the fair market value of those licenses. A business license is not a privilege that can be granted or denied at the government’s discretion.
Community NET loss. So losing license to operate there is a NET gain.
Of course issuance of a business license is at the government’s discretion. Otherwise why would they exist?
The other stores are not in that community. They’re in better neighborhoods where the crime is at a tolerable level.
And no, business licenses are not a privilege, any more than drivers’ licenses are, or, as we’ve recently seen, carry licenses in those states where they exist. They exist for administrative purposes only, and the government has no discretion in issuing them to those who satisfy objective and reasonable criteria.
This has to be the weirdest boycott ever. The only people that will care are fighting for a store that should close. They were already expecting to get 0% of your business once the store closed.
Instead of getting mad at them, get mad at the politicians that created the mess.
Or, ya know, the people robbing them blind so they have to close.
Dat would be racisssssssssss!
““I think because they don’t get any pushback.”
That’s the exact opposite of the truth when it comes to closing a store in a black community instead of in a community dominated by really any other race.
This is part of the reason why looters should be shot on sight.
The Rev Culpepper is welcome to stop his commie whining and have his church open a pharmacy to benefit the community. Of course, I don’t know why that community is so interested in drugs that have been invented by evil white men … A good voodoo doctor could do all the necessary work for a patient with a couple of chickens and some personal mementos.
don’t forget the arm of an albino…. good voodoo from albinos. Could always substitute whitey if there is a shortage
“to try and force Walgreens”
Try to, not try and.
M-w disagrees
“What is your obligation? What is your expectation as a corporate citizen to do what’s right for those communities beyond what’s right just for your bottom line?”
Absolutely none, you brain-dead communist. How about your obligation to elect leaders who keep your community safe enough for vital businesses to operate?
Notice the activists never attack the teachers unions, which will do anything to avoid parents having alternatives to the failing government schools.
I’m not sure I understand why that is. Are they stupid? Bribed? Did they get indoctrinated in the failing government schools?
This is what the collectivist mean when they spout off about ‘stakeholders’. As others have pointed out putting 1/2 the energy into directly committing the conditions that create a dysfunctional local society where theft from stores causes owners to lose money instead of whining about it afterwards would likely have prevented this.
This is precisely the question. And Milton Friedman gave the answer long ago: A corporation’s board has no duty to anyone except its shareholders; and it has a duty to those shareholders not to undertake any other purported duties at their expense.
“What is your obligation?” That’s a two-way street, and appropriate to ask the denizens of that neighborhood: “What is your obligation to support LEO to arrest criminals who terrorize your neighborhood? What is your obligation to elect responsible politicians to enact policies which don’t coddle criminals? What is your obligation to recall corrupt DAs who refuse to prosecute? Etc.
Instead of reflection they simple revert to ‘dindu nuffin’.
More like wone-do nuffin.
That’s a very good idea, and I’m sure the company would be very interested. All you have to do is make sure the store’s “shrinkage” rate goes down to the same level that’s considered acceptable in other neighborhoods. Maybe a neighborhood watch, maybe a citizen’s patrol, maybe just talk to all the local lowlives and persuade them that for their grandmothers’ sake they should leave the Walgreens alone and only steal from other stores, or target only stores outside the neighborhood. It doesn’t matter how, just get that shrinkage rate down, and make sure the staff aren’t afraid to come to work, and corporate will be glad to keep it open
They won’t be happy until all goods are free
They won’t be happy then either, because there won’t be any goods at all.
True
The only thing which is truly free is, literally ‘nothing’.
Really? Were they concerned and outraged when their neighbors and quite possibly themselves were robbing the store blind?
Yeah, didn’t think so.
Well, prescriptions can be delivered by mail… assuming nobody steals them out of your mailbox. But wait, Boston is a ‘Defund the Police’ city isn’t it?
Pity.
Let’s face facts, crime is the new black entitlement. Shit in your own nest, suffer the consequences.
Walgreen’s: “Fyck it. We out!”
Hey JR – you out there? Where are you, you master of everything is racism. Where are you?
When are you gonna open a Walgreens franchise in this neighborhood? Or don’t you really give a flying duck about blacks being denied a Walgreen’s outlet?
Pussy.
Uber Meds.
“Driver carries less than $10 in crack.”
“Don’t shut down your store or we’ll shut down your store?”
I have vague memories of a Monty Python sketch where a hijacker demands money or he will not wreck the plane or something.
Walgreens is closing its stores for at least two reasons:
1) Losses
2) Safety of customers and employees.
The WOK government has created the incentives for crooks to destroy Walgreeens.
In-N-Out To Close Crime-Plagued Oakland Location
https://sfstandard.com/2024/01/21/in-n-out-to-close-crime-plagued-oakland-location/
“’We are f***ed,’ an exasperated police officer candidly declares as he patrols a Chevron gas station in Oakland, California, during the morning rush.
https://twitter.com/thomashawk/status/1749052179565121924
So is Culpepper basically seeing the basis of his current grift evaporate. I believe this is the modern version of killing the goose. Too bad those who never spent any time learning to read weren’t aware that their was previous knowledge that could have kept this from happening. I guess they will keep making the same mistake until they get it right.
BTW, I got to see that the hom, err, feral humans in Portland were complaining that the warming shelters closed when it got back above 25 recently. Too bad they didn’t think about this last summer before it got cold. I am surprised too that they were closed, because freezing your butt off is step 0, which leads to step 1, and if people were to get off drugs, who would employ all of those do-gooders whose jobs are based on providing services to those on drugs. When Portland deals with its enabling problem, the drug and crime stuff will evaporate.