This week, in the course of about 30 minutes, a CNN TV crew observes three people stealing from inside a Walgreens in San Francisco.
The store, one of the most often robbed Walgreens in the nation, has resorted to locking up the majority of its merchandise behind chains or plexiglass.
Customers told Kyung Lah, a senior national journalist for CNN, that they had never seen anything like it before when she visited the store.
Theft at the store is “so typical that in the 30 minutes we were at this Walgreens, we watched three people, including this man, steal,” Lah said. “Did that guy pay? Did that guy pay? He didn’t pay?”
“Walgreens says this Richmond neighborhood store with aisles of products like mustard locked behind plexiglass has the highest theft rate of all their nearly 9,000 U.S. stores, hit more than a dozen times a day when thieves turn to cleaning out ice cream and frozen burritos, workers grew so frustrated, they resorted to the chains,” she continued. “They were ordered down by corporate because of the negative messaging.”
Around the city, other businesses have also been forced to lock up their stock, including a local grocery store that had to lock up bags of coffee.
One of the men who was spoken to in the grocery store admitted that he was at a loss for words when asked to describe the situation in the city.
“It’s become kind of like a police state in San Francisco,” he said.
San Francisco supervisor Matt Dorsey said that what he was hearing from residents is that it was time for “tough love.”
“We are not doing any addict in this city favors by enabling behavior that is potentially deadly in ways we have never seen,” he said.
In San Francisco, we went to the Walgreens that is the #1 spot for theft in all the 9000 US stores, per Walgreens. This is where chains once shut the freezer section. And we saw 3 thefts right in front of us. But across SF, coffee, mustard, nail polish– are all locked up: pic.twitter.com/IfYBVgpeI2
— Kyung Lah (@KyungLahCNN) July 25, 2023
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