The news of San Francisco’s ongoing disintegration just keeps piling up. Excerpt:
After months of seeing its shelves repeatedly cleaned out by brazen shoplifters, the Walgreens at Van Ness and Eddy in San Francisco is getting ready to close.
“The last day is Nov. 11,” Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso said.
The drugstore, which serves many older people who live in the Opera Plaza area, is the seventh Walgreens to close in the city since 2019.
“All of us knew it was coming. Whenever we go in there, they always have problems with shoplifters, ” said longtime customer Sebastian Luke, who lives a block away and is a frequent customer who has been posting photos of the thefts for months. The other day, Luke photographed a man casually clearing a couple of shelves and placing the goods into a backpack.
“I feel sorry for the clerks, they are regularly being verbally assaulted,” Luke said. “The clerks say there is nothing they can do. They say Walgreens’ policy is to not get involved. They don’t want anyone getting injured or getting sued, so the guys just keep coming in and taking whatever they want.”
For security reasons, Walgreens declined to provide details on their security policies, but Caruso did say that “the safety of our team members and customers is our top concern.”
A recent trip to the store revealed aisle after aisle of empty or near-empty shelves. Beauty supplies appear to be a favored target.
Most of the remaining products were locked behind plastic theft guards, which have become increasingly common at drugstores in recent years.
But at Van Ness Avenue and Eddy Street, even the jugs of clothing detergent on display were looped with locked anti-theft cables.
When a clerk was asked where all the goods had gone, he said, “Go ask the people in the alleys, they have it all.”
Of course. What you subsidize you get more of. What you penalize – with overbearing taxes and regulation – you get less of.
San Franciscans have nobody but themselves to blame for this. This is a city that, a decade or so back, actually had an argument among their city council members as to whether or not cracking down on public urination and defecation was somehow “unfair” to their homeless population. You can see for yourself the results of that discussion, as the city now hands out feces maps to tourists.
This is a city that has truly gone insane. And, it’s vital to note, the Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate is a product of that city’s political machine, in which she got her political career started atop Willie Brown’s penis.
Want to see this madness writ large? Like, on the national scale?
Go vote!
