Another day, and another Walgreens is closing down in Chicago. Chicago's municipal so-called "leadership" is trying to blame the closure on everything and everyone but themselves, but it is them and the city's mushy-headed, soft-on-crime policies that are to blame.
This Walgreens was losing 16 percent of its inventory to theft. That's intolerable, no matter how you look at it.
Walgreens is pulling out of Chicago’s South Side, home to some of the city’s most crime-ridden areas. The closure of a store in the city’s Chatham neighborhood, set for June 4, marks the seventh Walgreens location to shut down on the South Side in the past year.
Who’s to blame for this departure? Chicago Alderman William Hall, who represents Chatham as part of Ward 6, blames the company. Walgreens, he said, should be charged with “first-degree corporate abandonment” for creating a “medicine drought,” and he even accused it of committing a “pharmaceutical genocide.” (It’s particularly rich that Hall is now castigating Walgreens for closing, given that he hadn’t been happy about Walgreens opening, alleging it “ran out” small, local businesses.)
Hall, of course, cannot be taken seriously in this issue. Furthermore, he doesn't seem to understand that he can't just make up crimes, like "first-degree corporate abandonment," which is pure horse squeeze.
No, here's the real problem:
Walgreens has been clear that crime is the problem. At a town hall on May 9, executives revealed that the Chatham store lost more than $1 million last year due to shoplifting and declining prescription sales. The location loses 16 percent of its inventory to theft—four times the company average, according to Walgreens’ regional vice president.
Like many stores reeling from the national surge of retail theft, the Chatham Walgreens was forced to install lock boxes to protect merchandise. And it spent more than $400,000 a year on security guards. Yet criminals were undeterred. Thieves broke the locks, leaped over counters to steal liquor and cigarettes, and assaulted workers.
There's the problem, but politicians like William Hall are more concerned with grandiosity than actuality.
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Left-wing politicians love nothing more than to point and shout about corporate greed when a store in a high-crime neighborhood closes, when they should really be taking a good, hard look in the mirror. Chicago's feather-headed politicians, from Mayor Johnson on down, own this. Mayor Johnson himself, in a fit of accidental honesty, admitted that he didn't think jailing criminals made the city safe, as though letting them have free run of the streets is more effective at delivering a clean, safe Chicago.
Government, at any level, has one purpose: Protecting the liberty and property of the citizens. Not only has Chicago failed at this, but it seems too many of Chicago's elected representatives are denying that their names are on the blame line. Meanwhile, the remaining honest citizens in this neighborhood and other Chicago neighborhoods now have to travel farther to get their groceries, to get their prescriptions filled, to conduct any trade at all.
It's not corporate greed. It's government incompetence.
Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.
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