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Comment by leoh | Hacker News Reader

Walgreen's is not in the business of morality. They are in the business of making money. Walgreen's could say just about anything they wanted about closing up shop in San Francisco and it doesn't really make good business sense for them to say something provocative. It seems to me they're telling the truth.

On the other hand, the San Francisco DA is acting in a highly defensive manner. It's pretty offensive of them and it's pretty clear they're doing a bad job.

Worse, the San Francisco DA is helping create a false dichotomy between safety and compassion. I think both are possible; the SF DA, however, does not seem competent enough to offer either.

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Walgreens could easily respond by putting up historical store revenues and profits that show year over year increasing tear from each store they closed.

The DA put up numbers showing that in the past 2 years thefts have gone down. I’ll for now trust the one that puts up the numbers.

It was also decided to not respond to shoplifting reports under $950, which may be the cause of the 'reduction in reported larceny'. People may have stopped reporting it.

Didn't they change the definition of what counts as "theft" though? Also, wouldn't less people bother to report theft if they know it probably won't be prosecuted?

I have no idea who is telling the truth, but wouldn't it be fair to say that people working for the city do have more of a motivation to spin this than Walgreens?

If Walgreens is doing what the city claims, then Walgreens doesn't need to blame the city. They might anyway, but there's no big incentive. If they have a lot of stores that aren't closing, wouldn't it even be potentially harming their business for no reason?

Whereas, if the situation is what Walgreens says, then the city does need to blame Walgreens.

I have never been to SF and don't have any idea about the facts on the ground. Just, coming from ignorance, it seems logical to me to bet the opposite way from you.

One response to a decrease in reported theft and an increase in viral videos of theft is that the number of videos is misleading and "the numbers" prove it.

Another is that people aren't reporting theft as much because it's either out of control or perceived as such due to the videos. And/or the authorities have ways of manipulating the statistics.

I don't know that one or the other interpretation is correct, but if someone presents the first one as obvious without delving into why it is certainly true, then I tend to distrust them overall.

I also am not strongly on one side there, but I can think of a few incentives for Walgreens to not say admit that certain stores are being closed due to lack of profits (indicating perhaps to investors that they've overbought in many areas and that their overall revenue will be going down, and hence their stock prices and the C-suite's bonus).

However I also agree that there's not enough info here to be definitively in one camp or another - hence my ploy to say hey these folks at least have data, to try to get the other side to put up their data. The interesting part would be how far off that data is, and then someone's got some 'splaining to do, either to voters or investors.

1. Walgreens is correct - the SF DA is vastly undercounting thefts. This is very much of the public interest

2. Walgreens is lying - this is very much in the interest of walgreens investors

3. Middle ground (probably likely here) - those particular stores had a lot more theft than the average in SF and were particularly targeted. Neither is lying, but walgreens assertion that theft is rampant is somewhat weasel words.

You can't be too cynical about management, but the investors are overwhelmingly institutions such as the largest index funds in the world. Walgreen's is something like 0.1% of the stock market. If they vaporized tomorrow, so much the better for their competitors which the same entities own.

I guess management might be playing to the few people that bet the farm on Walgreens, but I can't imagine what they are like or what the execs think they want.

You suggest that management doesn't want to admit they're closing stores for other reasons, but they do admit they're closing some stores for other reasons, right? That was cited in the article, which linked to an SEC filing saying they're spending over $2 billion to close stores.

Is it plausible individual investors and/or bonus agreements are critically affected by the reasoning provided for a handful of store closings out of hundreds?

Is it plausible even someone who invested every dollar they own in Walgreens cares about SF specifically, when they have 10,000 locations?

I don't think there's a way to recover a self-consistent narrative from the article.

Of course, that in no way proves that corporate mouthpieces are truthful or that they're not up to something.

The DA did not put up numbers showing that thefts have gone down. The DA put up numbers showing that reports of thefts have gone down.

Those are different things, don't you think?

Why would someone report a theft of under $1000 in SF when going outside and yelling at the sky would be precisely as likely to result in something being done?

Do those numbers show the ones which stay under that strange 99x USD (prosecution?) limit, or do they not account for them anymore?

If Walgreens is in the business of making money, what is the San Francisco DA in the business of?

Same business, different boss.

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