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Comment by ghufran_syed | Hacker News Reader

>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…

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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.

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?

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