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yupper32

And the solution that many stores have been doing is to put basic cheap items behind a lock and key.

The last time I went to a Walgreens I needed to buy:

1. Mouth wash

2. Tooth paste

3. Shaving cream

I had to drag some poor employee over for all three items to either unlock a lock, or go into the back to find the item because they only had a display box.

Another time I went and I couldn't find anyone with a key. The person behind the counter said they didn't have one and they didn't know where the person with the key went. After waiting around for a few minutes I left to go to the Safeway nearby to try there instead. Only to find the item I needed was also locked down. I gave up. No one wanted my money.

I just drive out of the city to do my shopping now. It's a much better experience.

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Walgreens have started to respond by closing stores. Good on them. No one can survive with widespread unmitigated and unprosecuted shoplifting.

Once shops start closing down, people will ask and complain why stores don’t exist in their neighborhoods, or they’re too expensive but low quality. It’s cost of doing business.

‘Cheesy Pudding’, the DA, is high on the list of everyone’s favorite target for a recall, but sadly, I think most people won’t bother with the recall effort and the downward spiral will continue.

Some of the people who espouse these policies see Marxism as an example but Marxism would never ever put up with rampant delinquency.

>Once shops start closing down, people will ask and complain why stores don’t exist in their neighborhoods, or they’re too expensive but low quality.

And the answer by the people who implemented this policy will, no doubt, be “institutional racism” by walgreens…

Don't forget "food deserts"!

What are you talking about? Do you believe that impoverished neighborhoods which are underserved by grocery stores ("food deserts", a real phenomenon) drove them away because residents shoplifted from them too much, or something?

It's happening here where I live - we have a locally owned grocery store has had to reduce hours, post a guard, and now is considering closing because of rampant shoplifting.

Partly. It's also a lack of demand for decent food. It's not like Krogers (etc) is part of some conspiracy to not sell produce to poor people. That's what the media seems to think, but I don't think so.

This is correct. Not only are grocery store profit margins razor thin in a general sense, they're thinnest for packaged food found on the shelves in the middle of the store. The biggest margins are in seafood, meat counter, bakery, and produce—the ones more privileged people frequent more often, and poor people less. If the store is in a zip code where poverty is rampant, packaged, canned, and boxed food starts looking a lot like a cost center from a business perspective.

This isn't directly related to shoplifting and theft since the high priced items are usually behind the counter, but if you are a grocery chain with hundreds of stores the poorly performing ones are always going to be closed first. And those are almost always in urban, crime-ridden areas.

[Source: worked as a supermarket cashier as a teenager.]

Not sure if you were being sarcastic, but as someone with friends in the corporate side of a large grocery chain (guess which one from my username), this is absolutely a reason food deserts exist. The finances for them just don’t work.

In Emeryville (across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco), there is a Pak N Save supermarket that underwent a significant remodeling/rearrangement a couple of years ago. One of the major changes was that all the alcohol, cosmetics, and personal hygiene supplies were moved to a separate section of the store with a supervised "choke point" through which customers had to enter/exit.

I asked the management why they did this, because it was chronically understaffed, and required customers effectively check out twice if they were buying items from this section and the rest of the grocery store. Their response was that it was the only practical option to keep the store open, because otherwise, the amount of shoplifting taking place was going to render the location unprofitable.

So yes, this is a very real possibility.

I can't tell if you're joking or just trolling. What do you think drove them away?

The problem in SF is peculiar. Lots of the crime isn't by locals, but by opportunists from San Mateo or Alameda, etc., they’re not dumb. They know San Mateo county does not play the same game as SF, so they come in and go unimpeded.

The useless SF DA is at great fault here. The cops don’t want to spin their wheels when they know anything below ~$950 doesn’t get prosecuted. And in addition the DA, having felon parents, has a soft spot for criminals. SF bought that whole sale because voters have been made believe the way to turn criminals into productive members of society is to say, “pretty please” and they believe they just haven’t said please nicely enough. Well here we are now.

The ideal scenario here is to make petty theft impossible, either via amazon go (adding some cubicle thing that doesn't let you enter without scanning your amazon account) or via some huge inventory system that only dispenses/unlocks items when you pay for them - but I doubt/wonder if this is even a thing, or if it's being worked on by some SF startup. Another option is that these stores shut down, everyone gets package lockers for their homes, and they buy everything, including groceries, via Amazon. Not the best state of the world.

> Marxism would never ever put up with rampant delinquency

Once in control, yes, Marxists would not allow rampant delinquency. But until that day file this under "by any means necessary".

Well, yes, of course, and you're right. It's just so ironic and I think these idealists really never read Lenin or if they did they just ignored the bad parts. It's kinda delusional.

They’d be called consumerist capitalist destabilizers, counterrevolutionaries who are undermining the people's revolution, etc., etc, get their houses marked, harassed and taken to the klink.

In Eastern Europe under communism, you would be thrown in jail if you did not work. The official name of this crime was "parasitism", as you were not contributing to society - this happened to an uncle of mine who had to serve one summer of hard labor for not finding work fast enough after graduating. That ticket that said you had a job and showed up each day was a life and death thing. It also famously happend to Joseph Brodsky -- sentenced to five years hard labor for parasitism when the authorities decided that being a poet did not constitute gainful labor.

Also, if you missed a day of work, you better have a doctor's note. I once asked my parents what happened if you just didn't show up to work for a day and didn't have a doctor's note, and she looked at me and said "I don't think anyone dared to do that." Imagine being thrown in jail for calling in sick but not having a doctor's note to show your employer.

Of course crimes like theft were punished a lot more severely than in the West, and the result was indeed very little of that type of crime. Of course having an extensive network of secret police and informants everywhere helped with that. But that's the difference between being the revolutionary trying to overthrow capitalism and being the nomenklatura trying to keep the shelves stocked once capitalism has been overthrown.

The same thing is happening in Seattle. For example an Asian grocery store here filed nearly 600 police reports in a 1.5 year period, in addition to all the incidents they never reported (https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/repeat-shoplifters-continue...). As the article notes, drugstores have also begun closing locations. The only grocery store in the downtown core also closed (https://thepostmillennial.com/downtown-seattle-loses-its-onl...) - the shoplifting was bad enough but that compounded with rioting and COVID was too much for them to stay in business.

No, Marxists utilize thieves as a resource. They can be mobilized to destabilize social cohesion wherever signs of organized resistance appear.

I think it is a point of historical interest that Stalin was a bank robber at one point, with his takings being used to fuel the revolution in Russia.

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/joseph-stalin-was-ru...

(I'm not suggesting that these thieves are a part of a revolution of any kind)

Marx referred to such delinquents as the lumpenproletariat, an: "essentially parasitical group [that] was largely the remains of older, obsolete stages of social development, and that it could not normally play a progressive role in history. Indeed, because it acted only out of socially ignorant self-interest, the lumpenproletariat was easily bribed by reactionary forces and could be used to combat the true proletariat in its efforts to bring about the end of bourgeois society. Without a clear class-consciousness, the lumpenproletariat could not play a positive role in society. Instead, it exploited society for its own ends, and was in turn exploited as a tool of destruction and reaction."

The Walgreens near where I life (Bush and Fillmore) has a padlock on the red bull fridge. It was pretty shocking to get back from spending awhile in Korea where convenience stores are plentiful, 24/7, and fast to find this new development.

Please don’t chalk me up as some kind of Marxist activist, but: that padlock probably says a lot about the addictive nature, pricing, and perhaps engineered scarcity of Red Bull.

This would be a compelling point, if the shampoo wasn't also under padlock.

> This would be a compelling point, if the shampoo wasn't also under padlock.

Maybe the shampoo is really as appealing as the advertisements suggest.

What's frequently under lock and key isn't items thieves themselves want, but items that are easy to fence. A lot of people have no objection to buying say unopened, brand name, but obviously stolen laundry detergent for pennies on the dollar.

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