San Francisco Hardware Store Requires Customers Shop With Escort to Curb Shoplifting
“We just want to make it uncomfortable for the thieves so they go somewhere else.”
Fredericksen Hardware and Paint in San Francisco will allow only customers to enter the store when an employee can escort them.
The store has been a staple in the city’s Marina neighborhood for 100 years.
It’s a creative way to stop shoplifters! From KRON4:
“It’s pretty bad,” said manager Sam Black. “I mean, the dollar amounts are pretty significant, and with the tools and now we’re getting snatch-and-grabs when they take whole displays, so it’s getting kind of dangerous for the employees and the customers.”
Black says for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening an employee will work with individual customers. A table at the front serves as a way to keep potential thieves from moving freely in and out of the store.
“We just want to make it uncomfortable for the thieves so they go somewhere else,” Black said.
Black said over his 24 years of working at Fredericksen’s the theft is the worst it has ever been. The staff has had to drill down pots and pans to keep shoplifters from swiping them.
The employees implemented “locking systems” that prevent people “from pocketing tools and other household hardware.”
One employee said the computers would tell them the store had seven of one item, but it really only had one.
Black had to take matters into his own hands because the police and city doesn’t help much.
ABC7 discovered the Marina neighborhood suffered 81 larceny-theft shoplifting incidents in 2023:
That’s higher than every year going back to 2019.
Luz Pena: “Have you filed police reports on this?”
Sam Black: “That doesn’t really do anything. So yeah there is no point unless it’s really dangerous, but I don’t want to cry wolf on something for $50 bucks. I want to save that for when someone is getting hurt or something.”
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Not surprising. With CA now providing free health insurance to illegal aliens as of Jan 1, 2024, a tsunami of illegal immigrants is now flooding into CA cities. These “quality of life” crimes that CA refuses to prosecute are exploding. This is only tip of the iceberg. Home Depot is locking down merchandise behind steel cages in all CA stores now.
Would that force a return to CUSTOMER SERVICE?
Sure it will improve service, at a huge cost. which the consumer will bear. What I don’t understand is whey they have not moved out of California.
Nah not really. At home depot they can’t even tell you what isle to go to, much less give you advice on what works for your specific requirement. Staff just pulls out smartphone and pretends to search the store inventory, and then tells you to check online you might need to order it.
You could call it the PRESIDENTIAL SERVICE. Like if that other hardware store had assigned a clerk to accompany Brandon around, he wouldn’t have wandered away from the camera crew and gotten lost.
I wouldn’t mind an escort when hardware shopping. As long as it was an escort, and not just one of the scary-looking women from the street corner.
Of course, being a hardware store, I’d expect her to look more like the woman in the old Wendy’s Soviet fashion advertisement.
Wait. What do you mean “not that kind of escort”?
First off, why is everyone wearing a mask?
Even the CDC came out and said masks don’t prevent transmission of coronavirus.
Second off, California decriminalized theft of less than $1000 per day.
Even if the police come and arrest the shoplifters, nothing will happen.
Third off adding more police, as Called for in the video as left wing prosecutors I’ll not put criminals in jail.
You can be certain that any store owner who protects property with force will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
And that lady who shrugged her shoulders and said it was a sign of the times
Come to Florida, and you will see storeowners hold shoplifters with force, and the police take them away in handcuffs, and the prosecutors and judges lock criminals in jail.
Shoplifts $950 or less is a misdemeanor and Soros DAs don’t prosecute those crimes.
No, it didn’t. No matter how many times you see this claim, it remains untrue.
California draws the line between petty theft (misdemeanor) and grand theft (felony) at $950, which is lower than most states. In Texas, for instance, the line is $2,500.
Do you imagine that means Texas is softer on crime than California?! Of course not. Where a state draws that line is not important. The difference is that in Texas petty theft is likely get you arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned, while in California the police have more important things to do.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…”
Since the government no longer “secure[s] these rights”, there is no justification for its continued existence as defined by the Declaration of Independence.
The more important question, will the escort assist customers in cleaning the bum excrement from the soles of shoes?
Been to SF a dozen times, will never set foot in that city again.
No point in reporting crime to police, they never come anyway in CA. lol
And when it is a property crime, they claim it is a civil issue. That is not the officer’s fault, it is management.
Its the victims fault because you didn’t properly secure your property. CA logic.
Apparently, there is a law in CA that makes breaking int a car and stealing stuff a misdemeanor when the victim can’t prove the car was locked. This makes tourists vulnerable because they aren’t available to testify at trial.
Time to leave SF sir
The end of self-service shopping as we have known it.
Are people going to demand a refund on their state taxes?
The police do not exist to protect the citizens since that would be an impossible task requiring knowledge of future crimes. The police exist to protect the criminals from what might be considered over-zealous punishment of them by the citizens.
When the police and criminal justice system no longer function at all it will be taken up by the citizens, who will deal with crimes not by calling for the police, but by calling for the support of their fellows. A form of justice will be meted out, but it will not resemble anything like a rational system.
It will only be a matter of time and experience before shoplifting becomes a de facto capital crime with the perpetrators simply “disappearing”; the city equivalent of the rural “S-S-S”.
I do not welcome nor endorse this concept, but am simply predicting what will happen when those charged with the responsibility for maintaining law and order abdicate their responsibility…as they are currently doing.
Call 811 before you dig.
everything has to eat …
worms coyotes, buzzards, crabs, everything … if you choose to use
something like say acid to dissolve something .. remember
sulfuric acid etches glass so use
a plastic container .. hydrochloric acid the container should be glass ….
if a wood chipper is used hydrogen peroxide dissolves blood with out the smell of bleach. handy things I have learned over the decades ….
being a harmless old man I of course would never resort to anything like this … but I tend to be a store house of knowledge.
😀
I agree with most of your post, Blackwing.
The police cannot predict and intervene in crime. They exist to arrest perpetrators after a crime and stand them up in front of a judge, put them in jail and hold them until the crime is adjudicated. This has a deterrent effect, as criminals might not engage in crime if they believe they will be punished.
I am pretty old and have never feared for my life and property like this before. It has gotten so bad here in CA that I have started to take my loaded weapon while driving my car, which is illegal without special dispensation (a concealed carry permit). Any punk that tries to carjack me is going to take a bullet to the chest, legal consequences be damned.
Erronius
Never mess with a man who owns pigs. — Brick Top.
The best response to a threat is to say “I have friend who owns a pickup, a shovel, and a tarp; and if I call him at 2AM, he won’t ask why.” Unlike places on the East Coast, Portland is surrounde by lots and lots of empty space easily accessed by logging roads, and the smarter criminals know this. We also have a coyote cleaning service at our disposal.
Closing up shop and moving elsewhere would be the sane action. Things are not going to get better in San Fran. It’s all just downhill from here … for a very, very long time.
It’s almost surprising since pretty much everything at hardware stores has to do with getting work done, and we know lazy communist garbage doesn’t work.
I recently visited Tucson’s celebrated Tanque Verde Swap Meet. Scattered over the acres were several huge displays of “used power tools” for sale by hard-looking gentlemen. Used by a white-gloved maitre’d, perhaps, to cut butter, once. DW and I glanced at each other and increased our pace towards more traditional flea booths.
They steal tools to futher their stealing ability. Angle grinders are very popular in Portland and are basically considered burglary tools these days.
Might be hard to explain to the mrs. about shopping with an escort.
Just exclude blacks from store.
Yeah. Exclude all Blacks from the store. Because all Blacks are thieves, right? You misplaced your white hood again.
No, not all blacks are thieves, but just about all the thieves in the crimes described are black. I did not misplace my hood. A black stole it.
SF fat black mayor breed going to get wiped out in next election. Her black appointed DA and chief of police haven’t been making her look any better. SF city hall is woke joke.
No, JR, not all blacks are thieves. In fact most blacks are not thieves. Hunt is nevertheless correct that banning all blacks from the store would eliminate the majority of theft.
For that matter, locking up all black males from age 12 to 45 would reduce crime tremendously. That is, if you don’t count the enormous crime doing so would constitute.
If the left were right that saving lives should trump the Bill of Rights, then we could save thousands of lives by suspending the fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth amendments. We’d get a much greater return on our moral “investment” than we would from suspending the second, as they keep demanding.
We don’t do so because we recognize that our fundamental rights are more important than saving lives. If they weren’t then our predecessors wouldn’t have been justified in killing and dying for them. And so we sacrifice lives to protect a greater value, our civil liberties. And that includes the RKBA.
I think that’s all Hunt meant to say.
It’s not race that causes so many blacks to be criminals, it’s culture and those who embrace the ghetto gangster culture choose too be criminals.
Only about 80% of them. Those who leach off society on welfare and crime.
If you don’t believe this then how is it that young black men are 7 times more likely to commit murder than young white men? How is it that 40% of young black men are in jail, prison or on probation?
It’s good to know that E Howard Hunt would exclude Justice Clarence Thomas from the store. E Howard Hunt is KKK.
His wife can shop for him.
Not all blacks are thieves, but the per capita rate is higher for blacks. It would be great if they took this problem seriously.
This is pretty evident when watching po po bodycam footage on Youtube. Those who object always say that we are racists because we don’t look at the clips which show an equal number of whites commiting crimes, but then they always seem to disappear after we ask them to provide url’s of these clips. The frequency seems to be in the 80-90% zone. What is closer to 100% is someone appearing out of the blue screaming “you shot him for no reason” and “he didn’t have a gun” despite there being 100% conclusive evidence that neither of those assertions were true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BIoffg-1Ig&t=9s
I have often told close friends that if aliens came down from space and we asked them what to do about violent crime, they would look at the statistics and merely say, “eliminate the blacks”.
The number of murders would decrease by a factor of 8.
Of course, we cannot do that nor am I advocating for it, but it is true.
Erronius
The uniform crime reports are very illuminating on these stats. Up till 2020, about the same number of black and whites are murdered in the US every year. What leaps out is that 90% of blacks are killed by other blacks, and not the feared white supremacists. When you factor in the differences in size of the groups, it works out to a black person being 30X more likely to be murdered by a black than a white. To fix this(???), they decided to defund the po po (not a problem in the first place) and the end result was a 20-30% annual increase in the murders of blacks by other blacks, because there were no longer police protecting the black community from their own thugs. Once again, ignorant white liberals making things far worse by trying to make it better.
Only if you don’t count those murders. That’s the big flaw in arguments of this kind.
But Dems seem to think it’s OK in the context of the first and second amendments, so why not the rest of our rights?
“It’s just a sad sign of the times…”
No, it’s a sign of the failure of the policies enacted by the people you elected.
A people always gets the government it deserves.
The vile Dhimmi-crats’ efforts to turn the U.S. into a third-world country and/or failed state, continue apace.
since the government encourages the burning down of cities
his fears are warranted
I’ve said this here before but will say it again.
Most consumer retail stores devote 1/4 of their square feet to incoming deliveries by truck. The remaining 3/4 is devoted to consumer shopping.
This will reverse. There will be no more consumer products except one of each, locked down hard. If you wish to purchase that item, you will rip a ticket off of the shelf representing that item.
You will gather your tickets and go to the checkout line, at which time you will pay your bill. Then, and only then, will your purchase be fulfilled, likely by driving your vehicle to the back of the store, where employees will come fill your trunk.
Erronius
A local store did this policy with their deli, where the food was only handed over after being paid for at the deli register. I told the store manager that in a week he will have to let go one of the four deli employees, since at least 1/4 of the food prepped there was being eaten by homeless people over in the starbux area before the change in policy. The number of ferals enetring the store dropped immediately once the free food ended.
have seen this at office max
for equipment … not office supplies
yet …..
CA facing lost decade under Dem super majority. If you work in tech, you might want to angle yourself for position that is remote work from home, so you can relocate out of state.
I know of a hardware store in Berkeley who for years has kept almost all stock behind the counter. You have to approach the counter, ask for what you want and staff goes in the back and gets it for you … they even do this for nuts and bolts.
A better way for stores to do this is to have a website where customers place orders for the hardware they want. They pick up their order at the hardware store’s door which reduces shoplifting.
Hey, here’s an idea: Let’s elect the greasy haired far left winger who brought SF and California to it’s knees in crime and taxes, and make him POTUS? What a fantastic idea!! Sure he’ll destroy America like he did California but he’ll look good doing it and that’s all that liberals really care about…. Well, that and keeping the right for women to slaughter their babies up to the second they are born, and of course acknowledging any and all types of sexual perversion’s as normal behavior. Newsome 2024!!