The pharmaceutical chain Walgreens will be closing five stores in San Francisco, California due to a spike in “organized” shoplifting impacting its locations, according to MarketWatch via MSN.
The decision was made by Walgreens’ parent company, Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., which will relocate all employees to new locations and ship all outstanding prescriptions to other stores within one mile of the original stores. The stores will be shut down sometime between November 8th and November 17th.
“Retail theft across our San Francisco stores has continued to increase in the past few months to five times our chain average,” the company revealed in the statement announcing the decision. “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.”
Similar actions were taken by other companies in recent weeks. Retail giant Target Corp. announced that it would be shortening the summer hours at all five of its locations in San Francisco due to the rising crime. Target stores were often the target of the violent race riots that took place last year, with several locations being burned and looted by far-left domestic terrorist organizations such as Black Lives Matter and Antifa.
These moves come after numerous videos of brazen robberies have gone viral on social media. After a law was passed in the state of California to make it no longer a crime to shoplift, as long as the value of stolen goods remains below $1,000, there has been a spike in shoplifting in broad daylight, often in full view of security and other customers. Criminals will often enter such stores with empty garbage bags, fill up the bags with items from the shelves, and then simply walk out.
On most occasions, bystanders simply film the thefts and do not intervene. In one instance in July, a Rite Aid employee tried to stop two shoplifters in Los Angeles, only to be shot and killed.