Walgreens is shuttering a location in Chicago, upsetting residents, and stirring fury among exploitative and complicit politicians. The way some local “leaders” tell it, the drugstore chain is acting greedily, selfishly, or even criminally.
“Walgreens should be charged with first-degree corporate abandonment,” thundered a local alderman. “It should be a crime, the way they’re treating our elders. It should be a crime, the way they’re treating our families.”
This is complete nonsense, of course, but the asinine nature of his flailing is laid bare by Walgreens’ reasons for closing its store in the Windy City’s Chatham neighborhood. According to the local Fox affiliate, the corporation was losing more than $1 million annually at that location, driven by stunning levels of theft and exorbitant security costs.
Walgreens executives revealed the store lost more than a million dollars last year, partly due to declining prescription sales but also a massive amount of store theft.
“Theft at this store is 16 percent,” Johnson said. “That’s four times above the company average.”
And the company explained that they tried to stop theft.
“Lock boxes help us protect the merchandise in the store. A lot of the time, those lock boxes were getting destroyed. And that’s at a great cost to the company,” said Jason Vasquez, Walgreens District Manager.
They say Walgreens was spending $400,000 a year on security guards in the store, but there were still attacks on store employees.
“We’ve had people jump across the counters, because we sell liquor behind the counter, taking liquor, cigarettes… That wears. That wears down. Not so much the financial piece but the endurance of that day in and day out,” said Lonnie Fuqua, the store’s manager.
That excerpt really says it all. A 16% theft rate with frequent physical attacks on employees, all despite a $400,000-per-year security expenditure, led to bleeding red ink. It was obviously unsustainable. But in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Chicago, the “problem” is Walgreens declining to forge ahead with this dangerous madness indefinitely. Politicians ask, “What about the resulting ‘prescription desert’ for community members?
Perhaps they should worry first and foremost about maintaining the rule of law in said community. This is reminiscent of when underserved residents in Minneapolis were adversely impacted by the leftist-fueled race riots of 2020. When public officials fail to maintain law and order, lots of people get hurt. That’s not the fault of businesses or anyone else. The core function of government is the enforcement of public order to defend citizens’ safety.
The last, pathetic gasp of failing political leaders is to scapegoat companies that decide they cannot continue to operate, due to terrible policies and untenable conditions. Seattle’s socialist mayor, Katie Wilson, is dabbling in the same sort of ludicrous blame shift.
“We cannot allow giant grocery chains to stomp all over our communities, close stores at will, and leave behind food deserts,” Wilson complained on the campaign trail.
Enough Seattle voters found this economic illiteracy appealing and elected her. Earlier this year, Democrats “proposed a bill [in] the Washington State Legislature [that] would allow cities to establish and operate grocery stores to address food deserts,” in support of the mayor’s rhetoric.
How do government-operated grocery stores perform? Just ask Kansas City.
VIRGINIA DEMOCRATS GOT WHAT THEY DESERVED
Undeterred by observable reality, leftist officials continue to return to the government-run grocery fantasy, with New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani describing his own related foray as a “grand experiment.” The first step in that experiment entailed Mamdani announcing plans for a store in Manhattan that will take years to open, and will “cost taxpayers roughly four times what rival markets spend on construction… and will likely run at a loss in perpetuity,” experts and industry sources told the New York Post.
If this is what “success” looks like, what would constitute failure?