What Retail Sales Looks Like in the Jungle

The quote is the beginning of the linked article.  It’s worth a read.

“Walgreens is shuttering a location in Chicago, upsetting residents, and stirring fury among exploitative and complicit politicians. The way some local “leaders” tell it, the drugstore chain is acting greedily, selfishly, or even criminally.

“Walgreens should be charged with first-degree corporate abandonment,” thundered a local alderman. “It should be a crime, the way they’re treating our elders. It should be a crime, the way they’re treating our families.”

This is complete nonsense, of course, but the asinine nature of his flailing is laid bare by Walgreens’ reasons for closing its store in the Windy City’s Chatham neighborhood. According to the local Fox affiliate, the corporation was losing more than $1 million annually at that location, driven by stunning levels of theft and exorbitant security costs.”

So, let’s sum it up:

• 16% of their merchandise is stolen per year.
• That equates to more than a million dollars in losses per year.
• They spent $400,000 in security for this one store
• Their employees were still subject to frequent physical attacks by the thieves.

And then Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson characterized Walgreen’s decision to shut the store as criminal abandonment.  Wow, that’s amazing.  If I were the mayor of the third largest city in the United States and I discovered that a vital retail provider of drugs for my citizens was pulling out because my police force had failed to keep thieves and thugs in check at this location, I would move heaven and earth to make an example of that store and surround it with cops 24/7 until the crooks gave up.  But Brandon Johnson blames the people being robbed and assaulted by the mob that represents his true constituency.

From one end of this country to the other all blue cities and states are devolving into something that more resembles third world, banana republic street chaos than the United States of America.  But I now doubt that the voters in these jurisdictions will ever kick the Democrats out.  Los Angeles is the current test case.  Spencer Pratt is lambasting Mayor Karen Bass on the abysmal record she has accumulated over her term.  Between the horror show that was the Palisades fires and the complete lack of assistance to the victims, to the enormous disgrace of the out-of-control homeless epidemic on the streets of Los Angeles, Pratt has been speaking out and posting advertisements mocking his opponent’s ineptitude.

But will it make any difference?  California is a one-party state.  It’s owned by the state-workers’ unions.  Their pensions are the only important policies they care about and the Democrats have bought their votes with these funds.  So, I expect nothing to change in California, New York and the rest of the blue states for as long as their states can fund those pensions.  When the day comes that they run out of other people’s money, there will be hell to pay.  But the devil works for them so I’m sure he’ll pony up.