Walgreens Closing Five More Stores in San Francisco Due to Rampant Theft
“San Fran shoplifters have been emboldened by a referendum that lowered the penalty for stealing goods worth less than $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor”
Walgreens has already closed twelve stores in the San Francisco area and now will close five more. The company has described the city’s rampant shoplifting as “organized retail theft.”
Over the last two years, progressive cities like San Francisco have declined to prosecute cases of shoplifting, which has only emboldened thieves.
Jesse O’Neill reports at the New York Post:
Walgreens closes five more San Francisco locations, citing ‘organized retail crime’
Walgreens is closing five more San Francisco locations as drug stores from the Bay Area to the Big Apple are besieged by rampant shoplifting and lax enforcement.
San Fran shoplifters have been emboldened by a referendum that lowered the penalty for stealing goods worth less than $950 from a felony to a misdemeanor, cops and prosecutors have said.
A spokesperson for the company confirmed the latest closures to SFGate.
“Organized retail crime continues to be a challenge facing retailers across San Francisco, and we are not immune to that,” Walgreens spokesperson Phil Caruso told the outlet.
“Retail theft across our San Francisco stores has continued to increase in the past few months to five times our chain average. During this time to help combat this issue, we increased our investments in security measures in stores across the city to 46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment.”
You may recall this viral video from June showing a thief robbing a Walgreens store in broad daylight:
People in San Francisco are shoplifting in broad daylight while being filmed by security
pic.twitter.com/ZPlqy1Xsa0— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) June 15, 2021
In this video from NBC News in San Francisco, Mayor London Breed pleads with would-be thieves to stop robbing stores, noting that when these stores close it hurts the community. Perhaps she should have thought of this a year and a half ago:
Other cities, such as New York have experienced a similar problem.
'Third World' NYC drug store shelves empty amid shoplifting surge https://t.co/yAmTa6sDoV pic.twitter.com/GP6pUvwtYU
— New York Post (@nypost) October 9, 2021
There is only one way out of this problem and the left doesn’t want to hear it. Police must be allowed to arrest thieves and the criminals must be prosecuted. That’s it. It’s really that simple.
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
This will become a much bigger problem for Washington state as well. With the recent state Supreme Court rulings and the general attitudes of large urban Mayors towards property or so-called “victimless ” crimes; I see a bleak future for all brick and mortar retailers.
I love the ‘victimless’ aspect. Because we all know the Kulaks deserve worse, amirite?
Landlords, shop owners, business owners – all the Enemy, now. We see it in posts about the eviction moratorium – ‘landlords deserve it.’ BLM/Antifa went out of their way to destroy businesses, “screw the owners – they’re just the bourgeoisie who will be up against the wall soon anyway.”
These people are not crazy, they’re moving the same old agenda forward. Same agenda that was used in every damn communist revolution.
Oh nooooooooo! A drug desert!
Wait! Maybe we should make the postal service run drugstores too.
No sympathy for jab dealers.
I suspect these stores were in marginal profit areas already, and the theft just pushed them over the red-ink line. If I had a store like this but still possibly profitable, I’d glass over the merchandise and have on-line ordering so a customer could either order at home, or walk down the aisle beeping codes with their phone, then pick up their package all wrapped and ready to go at the checkout. To heck with next day delivery dropped on your porch by UPS and stolen by the neighbors. Pick up or have it delivered by the equivalent of Door Dash when you’re at home.
Close em up, they don’t get it and won’t until it’s a desert for retail.
The traditional going-out-of-business sales with 25% 50% 70% 90% off on successive days aren’t going to work. You can get 100% off on the first day.
The shot in the NYC drug store appears to be the shelves with glucose meters and related items.
San Francisco being a drug desert. How delicious.
Meters are cheap. But they keep the strips in the safe.
Until voters wipe out people who deliver this to those who elect them, it is hard to feel too bad. Unfortunately, the ones who did not vote for this have to live with it or move. Or course, if Biden is successful with his Venezuela II program, there will be empty shelves everywhere.
And, of course, beyond the obvious damage done to company sales and revenue, who else suffers, when these stores are closed? The community, both in terms of jobs lost, and, services denied. Also, the city, due to a reduced quality-of-life for its residents, and, lower sales tax revenue and income tax revenue.
More evidence of the vile, Dhimmi-crat apparatchiks’ manifest stupidity and destructiveness, courtesy of their enabling and kid-gloves coddling of criminals.
Bag limits…. redistributive change and lowered expectations. This is their “shot”.
This is how ‘food deserts’ are made.
The left creates problems, and then points to the problems as evidence that we need more leftism.