In the city of San Francisco, numerous stores have turned to the drastic measure of putting locks on freezer doors containing frozen food in order to prevent the goods from being stolen by shoplifters.
As the New York Post reports, Walgreens is among the stores that have resorted to this tactic, with customers now requiring the assistance of a store clerk to unlock the chained coolers in order to put the frozen food into their shopping carts or baskets.
“Workers said normally shoplifters clean out all the pizza and ice cream every night,” said KPIX reporter Betty Yu on Twitter. “They’re usually hit 20x a day. The whole store is virtually locked up.” Yu’s tweet included a video of the rows of locked freezer doors at the Walgreens in question.
Elsewhere in the city, a CVS location has implemented similar security measures. A Twitter user posted a photograph of a giant padlock across the handles of a freezer door.
“Night time trip to the CVS pharmacy to get medicines, and I witness police car in front called to scene because of thief,” the tweet explained. “Of course many items locked up too like the frozen section!”
Rite Aid is another chain location in San Francisco that has been heavily impacted by the crime wave, with one such store announcing that it had to close due to “excessive loss from theft.” A shopper took to Twitter to say that it was “unfortunate that stores have to go to this extent to keep their stores open.”
“And all bathrooms at stores are either locked or code access only or have a sign that said not working,” she added.
While California has already seen a rise in crime due to softer criminal penalties, a recently-passed state law that eliminated criminal charges for thefts worth less than $1,000 has sparked an additional surge in mass shoplifting and looting across the state. The law, widely criticized by business owners and customers alike, is indicative of California’s push for a soft-on-crime approach across many of its largest cities, as well as statewide.