37 Comments

Walmart has a habit of locating stores in small towns, driving local businesses into bankruptcy, then when the stores are not as profitable as their formula says they should be, blame it on shoplifting and close the stores. Same practice for Walgreens.

Expand full comment

Walgreens is obsessed with shoplifting in NYC as well. Stores keep most items locked up behind plastic barriers. You have to wait for a staff person to unlock in order to access toothpaste or whatever. No other pharmacy does this. Now I’ll know to look out for the coordinating right wing media campaign about lawless shoplifters in NY.

Expand full comment

Coming from India, the ruling govt.does the same all the time. The journalistic culture & integrity has been downgraded to such an extent in these past 7 years - you can't tell what's news and what's propaganda anymore.

Expand full comment

Some years ago I worked as an assistant manager in retail. Corporate policy forbade physical intervention with shoplifting. Not all events were reported to police. Faces and sometimes names were taken down and shared with managers in our region. A common scam was to steal an item from one store, take it to another store and try to return it for cash. If seen by a manager at the store where the return was attempted, cops were called silently. Security video was available for review. Sometimes someone who did this was found to have done it many times and cops would get a warrant for their residence and vehicle, then discovering a trove of stolen items. The concept was to take action only when action would likely have great impact. I do not know what policies are in place today at Target, Walmart, CVS and Walgreens but ... reporting on that would provide greater context for this reporting.

Expand full comment

Isn't there a difference between "incidents" and "reports"? The graphic shows "reports," but I imagine there is also some not-insignificant difference between the 2 numbers due to apathy from merchants who are tired of reporting and seeing nothing done (or who believe nothing will be done).

Expand full comment

This goes beyond Walgreens. Target stores in the city now close at 6PM. The iconic Safeway in the Castro is no longer open 24 hours a day. They have all blamed these changes on an increase in shoplifting. So, either there is an issue with shoplifting or they have all decided that blaming decreases in revenue on shoplifting is a useful strategy. Anecdotally, my wife has witnessed someone instructing their daughter to steal a number of bottles of liquor from a local Safeway while the staff and security guard watched. Maybe many incidents aren't being reported, but you'd think that these stores would report everything to put pressure on the police and DA if the issue is really as rampant as they say. Maybe the number of incidents hasn't substantially increased but the average amount of merchandise per incident has increased significantly? As usual, the truth is probably somewhere in between what the stores report and what the police report.

Expand full comment

This is just so disheartening. Thanks for sharing your findings.

Expand full comment

"The New York Times piece did not appear in a vacuum. The false narrative of out-of-control crime in San Francisco, and California as a whole, is being pushed relentlessly by a far-right website run by a former Republican consultant who received a pardon from Trump." I'm shocked, I tell you. Just shocked.

Expand full comment
founding

You and your team are amazing...to come up with these details. How can we expose behavior such as that of Young Kim before it implodes the service of another Democrat in the Congress?

Expand full comment

Thanks for covering this as one of the Walgreens being closed is literally across the street from me. It's ridiculous.

Expand full comment

What has Walmart done to sue this group?

Expand full comment

There is an epidemic of shoplifting. The vast majority never gets reported to police. Most stores just take the hit on the losses.

Almost all the merchandise stolen from stores end up for sale on social media and Amazon.

Expand full comment

Seems to me that PI kinda buried the lead in this story - which resulted in a lot of strange comments about shoplifting/property crime/policing, one or two about CA politics/policing, and maybe one about the real subject, namely right wing control of (local) media, and its seepage into the NYT (seen here as the national newspaper of record, which, umm, it’s not?). —I don’t see much problematic about Walgreens’ internal decisions to shutter individual stores, in other words - as a customer of a few Chicago locations (and, full disclosure, a longtime Walgreens shareholder), i too have personally witnessed brazen shoplifting, with employees basically shrugging - not to mention the looting following the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd, that shut down at least one chicago Walgreens location for months. Retailing has been rough for the past few years, policing even tougher - so, business owners will make decisions that will be argued, and even misreported, but…as I said, I don’t think this was the point of the article. (It just looked that way because of the title & first few grafs.)

Expand full comment

Well, since the police and DA do absolutely nothing against crime in SF, or even discourage people from filing reports, it's not that surprising. There might not be organized gangs, but the complete lack of enforcement/penalties encourages everyone to shoplift, steal from cars and houses...

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment