What is going on on with San Francisco Walgreens closures?
In response to the unflattering tale, the elected leaders and progressive activists of San Francisco questioned the legitimacy of Walgreen’s statement for the store closings.
“They say that’s the main reason, but I also think when a place is not generating revenue and when it’s saturated – SF has a lot of Walgreens locations across the city – so I think there are other factors that are ins Game coming, ”Mayor London Breed told reporters on Wednesday.
Supervisor Dean Preston then wrote a Twitter thread complaining that “media reports without analysis have accepted Walgreens’ claim that it will be closed for retail theft,” and shared a 2019 SEC filing in which Walgreens announced plans to close 200 stores.
“So is Walgreens closing stores for theft or because of a pre-existing business plan to reduce costs and increase profits by consolidating stores and moving customers to online purchases?” asked Preston.
The city’s leaders and critics alike seem highly motivated to preserve their respective narratives, and the online discourse about the Walgreens closings is as polarized as one would expect when it comes to San Francisco crime.
To understand if Walgreens is telling the truth, let’s start with the SEC filing of August 2019, which Preston and other city progressives largely share. It states that the company plans to close “around 200 locations in the US” as part of a “cost management program” announced in December 2018.
For reference, the closings made up about 3% of Walgreens’ nearly 10,000 locations in the United States, CNBC reported, and Walgreens has closed 10 San Francisco locations since early 2019.
A Walgreens spokesperson told SFGATE in an email that the cost-cutting program to shut down locations in San Francisco was “pre-completed” before it was announced on Wednesday that five more stores would be closing.
When SFGATE asked Walgreens to respond directly to Preston and others’ allegations that the chain was considering considerations other than retail theft, the spokesman stopped returning emails.
Theft theft is up nearly 8% year-over-year, according to the San Francisco Crime Dashboard, although crime stats are skewed downwards in 2020 as the early days of the pandemic nearly brought life to a halt and forced temporary store closings.
If you compare the thefts of 2021 with the numbers before the pandemic of 2019, you will find that the number of thefts has actually decreased. From January 1, 2021 to October 10, 2021, there were 21,842 reports of theft, and over the same period in 2019 there were 31,958 reports, a decrease of 31.6%.
There were 33,312 reports of theft in the same period in 2018 and 35,483 reports in that period in 2017, so the number of theft reports has actually decreased in recent years.
Analyzing San Francisco’s crime statistics without external reference doesn’t tell the whole story, however, as the city has a higher than average rate of property crime. FBI data from 2017 showed that San Francisco had the highest property crime rate per capita of the 20 largest cities in the United States, and SF had the highest property crime rate in the state of California in 2019.
However, the data does not support the assumption that theft has increased significantly in recent years – although there has been an increase in viral videos depicting brazen thefts. Walgreens could argue that San Francisco retail theft rates are still so high that year-over-year declines don’t move the needle and the San Francisco operations remain unprofitable, but the company hasn’t opened its books – and will probably not doing it for perusal.
It’s also worth noting that theft encompasses a broader range of crimes than just retail theft, including theft of bicycles, automotive parts and accessories. San Francisco does not report isolated statistics on retail theft, let alone isolated drugstore theft.
Regardless, the Walgreens and San Francisco crime-related situation is a little more complex than the prevailing narratives suggest.
