18 ms·

Target finally explains why nearly all its SF stores have reduced hours

55 points by bryan0 5y ago

Nicksil 5y ago
>It's due to "a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents," said spokesperson Brian Harper-Tibaldo.
- leereeves 5y ago
  The same reason Walgreens closed 17 stores in SF, as was recently discussed here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216343
  - antifa 5y ago
    Which apparently wasn't actually the reason, according to: https://citationsneeded.medium.com/news-brief-organized-crime-shoplifting-epidemic-panic-hits-san-francisco-media-b044c0f78bfa https://citationsneeded.medium.com/news-brief-organized-crim...
    - leereeves 5y ago
      I trust the New York Times more than I trust some random blogger: > At a board of supervisors hearing last week, representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplifting-epidemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...
      - antifa 5y ago
        You trust the New York Times quote of a Walgreens PR guy at face value with no fact checking and no analysis over "some random blogger" who does fact checking and analysis for a living.
        leereeves 5y ago
        Also in that article you'd find statements from the director of the retail crime division at CVS Health, the head of the investigations bureau at the San Francisco Police Department, a member of the board of supervisors, and the author himself. Then you could read the dozens of major news sources that ran this story, a similar story right here about Target, the numerous anecdotes about crime in SF, and the DA's publicly announced policy. It's quite well established that crime in SF is costing Walgreen's and other retailers a lot of money. Is that the only reason those stores closed? Perhaps not, but I see no cause to doubt that it was a factor.
      - atatatat 5y ago
        Well, that's a mistake a nonzero amount of the time. I trust neither, by default.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bloniac 5y ago
But why? What’s the real deep down social reason this is happening?
- bryan0 5y ago
  This article from May talks a bit more about the causes: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplifting-epidemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift... Many people point to Prop 47 which “reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen goods are worth less than $950” Some also point the finger at DA Chesa Boudin for his low “charging rates”: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Francisco-crime-statistics-recall-16268178.php https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra... Basically if you shoplift in SF the benefits outweigh the costs.
  - x0x0 5y ago
    The stats seem to say shoplifting is not increasing in sf. Though that doesn't mean that any chain isn't experiencing something different. Or that the sf crazies aren't being even crazier post lockdown and causing more of the mentioned security incidents. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-shoplifting-rising-in-San-Francisco-Here-s-16272907.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-shoplifting-ris...
    - gruez 5y ago
      >The Chronicle analyzed Police Department incident report data from January 2018 through April 2021. [...] The data shows that shoplifting rates dipped at the start of the pandemic, when many stores shut down, and have since recovered to just below pre-pandemic levels. Is sampling bias potentially at play here? If you know that calling the police wouldn't do anything, why would you bother reporting it?
      - lazide 5y ago
        It’s definitely at play here - the cops often don’t even show up, and the stores have stopped bothering to call. If you don’t record it, it isn’t happening, as it were.
throwawaysea 5y ago
This uptick in crime seems to be happening in cities like SF and Seattle that practice “restorative justice”. As far as I can tell it simply amounts to being soft on crime by not having city attorneys actually charge and sentence criminals, and by changing the priorities of the police department. The net result of removing consequences is that there’s no deterrent and so criminals will repeat crimes and other criminals are encouraged. It’s all so obvious and predictable but “social justice” advocates have nevertheless been able to weaken the criminal justice system in this way at the expense of the law abiding portion of society. In the last couple months shoplifting incidents in the Bay Area have become a lot more brazen - like the theft of tens of hundreds of thousands in goods from luxury stores in broad daylight. The only way to change this is to recall crime-permissive people like SF DA Chesa Boudin and other politicians supporting these policies, and replacing them with a more-conservative hard on crime set of leaders.
- refurb 5y ago
  Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s all accurate. https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts-doubt-over-c77 https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts...
- wahern 5y ago
  > The only way to change this is to recall crime-permissive people like SF DA Chesa Boudin and other politicians supporting these policies, and replacing them with a more-conservative hard on crime set of leaders. Or, you know, simply replace people like Boudin with pretty much any of their opponents in the last election cycle, "tough on crime" or not. It's very difficult to express how radical Boudin is. It's difficult to say this without seeming hyperbolic, because the term has been abused to death a 1000x over by conservative outlets. But he's basically a Marxist, with both the intelligence and ambition to institute radical policies popular in the American Marxist community.[1] Here's Boudin in 2009 defending Chavez and his constitutional reform removing term limits: "Chavez for Life? There are at least three reasons why the world should congratulate Venezuela's Hugo Chávez on his recent success abolishing term limits", https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/ [1] With apologies to Marxists who also think Boudin's policies are too extreme and imprudent.
rdtwo 5y ago
It’s true SEattle is so crime friendly that my local Walgreens has more people going though the free shit line than they can process at the register. I don’t really understand how they make any money with losses that high
- HWR_14 5y ago
  What's a "free shit" line? Also, this is about SF, not SEA. This article also points out that Walgreens has not curtailed their hours. And if it's so bad, why wouldn't Target just hire more security personnel?
  - Proven 5y ago
    The police immediately release anyone who gets caught for streaking small value items. It seems security guards are there to prevent major security issues, not catch thieves. > Also, this is about SF, not SEA. Same problem in both states and cities - socialists driving everything into the ground.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    A lot of these pharmacy stores are setup such that the checkout is offset from the entrance/exit probably because most of the money comes from the pharmacy. It also means that shoplifters just go straight out carrying whatever they can grab and at least in my area they aren’t even trying to be discrete
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      Then why don't the stores just hire people to stop them?
      - sbierwagen 5y ago
        Stop them from doing what? The police won't prosecute. Security guards are private citizens and do not have an unlimited right to just grab other people and detain them. If the stolen goods are inside, say, a backpack, they also do not have the ability to search that backpack. You can only have security guards if the state backs them up. The state is not backing them up.
ruined 5y ago
sfpd's data shows that larceny is down compared to last year https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crime-dashboard https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim... so, i'm not sure i buy this. there was a similar lack of data around the claims by bay area Walgreens stores. and Walgreens was closing stores at similar or even faster rates in other locations, with no mention of theft.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  > claims I live in SF, see shoplifting every time I go out. So the claims are real. Gets fierce 30 minutes before closing at the local Walgreens. Most of the incidents are not reported to police, so the data simply can't be correct. Also, they would need an employee working at each store full-time just to file police reports. Then the police would ignore it since it's under the limit, I believe $950. Sounds like you're one of those Snopes pinheads who think everything can be debunked. And you can blame Kamala "and I haven't been to Europe" Harris for this too. She was a DA here from 2004-2011, when the US' largest crime lab fiasco happened, with 1,000 DNA cases spoiled.
- refurb 5y ago
  When people are shoplifting several times a day from your store and SFPD doesn’t even show up, how many of those incidents are captured in the data? I had my car broken into twice in SF and never reported it because, nobody cares?
  - lazyasciiart 5y ago
    All of them, because you report it to the police every time even if they don't show up, because otherwise youwill be blamed for the missing stock.
    - throwawaysea 5y ago
      Reporting is actually less common than you think for property crimes. None of my neighbors or friends report package thefts, car breakins, etc. For one the police can take hours to respond if they show up at all, especially in cities that are very understaffed like Seattle. Another angle is that insurance claims are simply not worth it because deductibles are high enough and in the end you’ll face higher premiums. And if the police are never going to investigate or arrest someone (or if the city attorneys just release the criminal), what’s the point? For businesses they have similar considerations of the tradeoffs. Here’s an example of a Seattle area grocery chain that had stopped reporting crimes: https://mynorthwest.com/1538741/uwajimaya-seattle-prolific-offenders/ https://mynorthwest.com/1538741/uwajimaya-seattle-prolific-o...

55 points by bryan0 5y ago

Nicksil 5y ago

>It's due to "a significant and alarming rise in theft and security incidents," said spokesperson Brian Harper-Tibaldo.

leereeves 5y ago
The same reason Walgreens closed 17 stores in SF, as was recently discussed here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27216343
- antifa 5y ago
  Which apparently wasn't actually the reason, according to: https://citationsneeded.medium.com/news-brief-organized-crime-shoplifting-epidemic-panic-hits-san-francisco-media-b044c0f78bfa https://citationsneeded.medium.com/news-brief-organized-crim...
  - leereeves 5y ago
    I trust the New York Times more than I trust some random blogger: > At a board of supervisors hearing last week, representatives from Walgreens said that thefts at its stores in San Francisco were four times the chain’s national average, and that it had closed 17 stores, largely because the scale of thefts had made business untenable. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplifting-epidemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift...
    - antifa 5y ago
      You trust the New York Times quote of a Walgreens PR guy at face value with no fact checking and no analysis over "some random blogger" who does fact checking and analysis for a living.
      - leereeves 5y ago
        Also in that article you'd find statements from the director of the retail crime division at CVS Health, the head of the investigations bureau at the San Francisco Police Department, a member of the board of supervisors, and the author himself. Then you could read the dozens of major news sources that ran this story, a similar story right here about Target, the numerous anecdotes about crime in SF, and the DA's publicly announced policy. It's quite well established that crime in SF is costing Walgreen's and other retailers a lot of money. Is that the only reason those stores closed? Perhaps not, but I see no cause to doubt that it was a factor.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      Well, that's a mistake a nonzero amount of the time. I trust neither, by default.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bloniac 5y ago

But why? What’s the real deep down social reason this is happening?

bryan0 5y ago
This article from May talks a bit more about the causes: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplifting-epidemic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/21/us/san-francisco-shoplift... Many people point to Prop 47 which “reclassified nonviolent thefts as misdemeanors if the stolen goods are worth less than $950” Some also point the finger at DA Chesa Boudin for his low “charging rates”: https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Francisco-crime-statistics-recall-16268178.php https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Chesa-Boudin-San-Fra... Basically if you shoplift in SF the benefits outweigh the costs.
- x0x0 5y ago
  The stats seem to say shoplifting is not increasing in sf. Though that doesn't mean that any chain isn't experiencing something different. Or that the sf crazies aren't being even crazier post lockdown and causing more of the mentioned security incidents. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-shoplifting-rising-in-San-Francisco-Here-s-16272907.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-shoplifting-ris...
  - gruez 5y ago
    >The Chronicle analyzed Police Department incident report data from January 2018 through April 2021. [...] The data shows that shoplifting rates dipped at the start of the pandemic, when many stores shut down, and have since recovered to just below pre-pandemic levels. Is sampling bias potentially at play here? If you know that calling the police wouldn't do anything, why would you bother reporting it?
    - lazide 5y ago
      It’s definitely at play here - the cops often don’t even show up, and the stores have stopped bothering to call. If you don’t record it, it isn’t happening, as it were.

throwawaysea 5y ago

This uptick in crime seems to be happening in cities like SF and Seattle that practice “restorative justice”. As far as I can tell it simply amounts to being soft on crime by not having city attorneys actually charge and sentence criminals, and by changing the priorities of the police department. The net result of removing consequences is that there’s no deterrent and so criminals will repeat crimes and other criminals are encouraged. It’s all so obvious and predictable but “social justice” advocates have nevertheless been able to weaken the criminal justice system in this way at the expense of the law abiding portion of society. In the last couple months shoplifting incidents in the Bay Area have become a lot more brazen - like the theft of tens of hundreds of thousands in goods from luxury stores in broad daylight. The only way to change this is to recall crime-permissive people like SF DA Chesa Boudin and other politicians supporting these policies, and replacing them with a more-conservative hard on crime set of leaders.

refurb 5y ago
Not sure why this is being downvoted. It’s all accurate. https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts-doubt-over-c77 https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/mounting-violence-casts...
wahern 5y ago
> The only way to change this is to recall crime-permissive people like SF DA Chesa Boudin and other politicians supporting these policies, and replacing them with a more-conservative hard on crime set of leaders. Or, you know, simply replace people like Boudin with pretty much any of their opponents in the last election cycle, "tough on crime" or not. It's very difficult to express how radical Boudin is. It's difficult to say this without seeming hyperbolic, because the term has been abused to death a 1000x over by conservative outlets. But he's basically a Marxist, with both the intelligence and ambition to institute radical policies popular in the American Marxist community.[1] Here's Boudin in 2009 defending Chavez and his constitutional reform removing term limits: "Chavez for Life? There are at least three reasons why the world should congratulate Venezuela's Hugo Chávez on his recent success abolishing term limits", https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/ https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/chavez-life/ [1] With apologies to Marxists who also think Boudin's policies are too extreme and imprudent.

rdtwo 5y ago

It’s true SEattle is so crime friendly that my local Walgreens has more people going though the free shit line than they can process at the register. I don’t really understand how they make any money with losses that high

HWR_14 5y ago
What's a "free shit" line? Also, this is about SF, not SEA. This article also points out that Walgreens has not curtailed their hours. And if it's so bad, why wouldn't Target just hire more security personnel?
- Proven 5y ago
  The police immediately release anyone who gets caught for streaking small value items. It seems security guards are there to prevent major security issues, not catch thieves. > Also, this is about SF, not SEA. Same problem in both states and cities - socialists driving everything into the ground.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  A lot of these pharmacy stores are setup such that the checkout is offset from the entrance/exit probably because most of the money comes from the pharmacy. It also means that shoplifters just go straight out carrying whatever they can grab and at least in my area they aren’t even trying to be discrete
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Then why don't the stores just hire people to stop them?
    - sbierwagen 5y ago
      Stop them from doing what? The police won't prosecute. Security guards are private citizens and do not have an unlimited right to just grab other people and detain them. If the stolen goods are inside, say, a backpack, they also do not have the ability to search that backpack. You can only have security guards if the state backs them up. The state is not backing them up.

ruined 5y ago

sfpd's data shows that larceny is down compared to last year https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crime-dashboard https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim... so, i'm not sure i buy this. there was a similar lack of data around the claims by bay area Walgreens stores. and Walgreens was closing stores at similar or even faster rates in other locations, with no mention of theft.

redis_mlc 5y ago
> claims I live in SF, see shoplifting every time I go out. So the claims are real. Gets fierce 30 minutes before closing at the local Walgreens. Most of the incidents are not reported to police, so the data simply can't be correct. Also, they would need an employee working at each store full-time just to file police reports. Then the police would ignore it since it's under the limit, I believe $950. Sounds like you're one of those Snopes pinheads who think everything can be debunked. And you can blame Kamala "and I haven't been to Europe" Harris for this too. She was a DA here from 2004-2011, when the US' largest crime lab fiasco happened, with 1,000 DNA cases spoiled.
refurb 5y ago
When people are shoplifting several times a day from your store and SFPD doesn’t even show up, how many of those incidents are captured in the data? I had my car broken into twice in SF and never reported it because, nobody cares?
- lazyasciiart 5y ago
  All of them, because you report it to the police every time even if they don't show up, because otherwise youwill be blamed for the missing stock.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    Reporting is actually less common than you think for property crimes. None of my neighbors or friends report package thefts, car breakins, etc. For one the police can take hours to respond if they show up at all, especially in cities that are very understaffed like Seattle. Another angle is that insurance claims are simply not worth it because deductibles are high enough and in the end you’ll face higher premiums. And if the police are never going to investigate or arrest someone (or if the city attorneys just release the criminal), what’s the point? For businesses they have similar considerations of the tradeoffs. Here’s an example of a Seattle area grocery chain that had stopped reporting crimes: https://mynorthwest.com/1538741/uwajimaya-seattle-prolific-offenders/ https://mynorthwest.com/1538741/uwajimaya-seattle-prolific-o...