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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