Retail giant Walmart has been competing in the Chicago area for seventeen years, eventually establishing eight outlets in the Windy City, along with a regional training center. But yesterday, the company announced that four of those stores will be closing. The company is claiming that the closures are taking place because the stores simply haven’t been profitable, which is apparently true. They’re not blaming the closures on violent crime and security concerns. But are we really buying that story? Here are some of the specifics from Fox News.

Walmart has announced Tuesday that it is closing four of its Chicago stores because they are part of a group of locations that “lose tens of millions of dollars a year.”

The retail giant says the Chatham Supercenter, the Walmart Health center, and the Walmart Academy at 8431 S. Stewart Ave., the Kenwood Neighborhood Market at 4720 S. Cottage Grove Ave., the Lakeview Neighborhood Market at 2844 N. Broadway St. and the Little Village Neighborhood Market at 2551 W. Cermak Road will shutter this upcoming Sunday.

“The simplest explanation is that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago.”

The four stores in question lose “tens of millions of dollars” per year according to a company spokesperson. If that’s the reality (no matter the cause) then the closures make sense. But while they may be denying it, the deteriorating conditions in Chicago had to have been a factor. First of all, Walmart faces competition from other retail outlets everywhere they operate. What is it about the local competitors that would make one of the most successful retailers in the country unable to win a sustainable share of the market?

The Chicago Walmart locations have seen their share of robberies from time to time. A couple of months ago, three people were shot in the parking lot of one of their outlets while loading groceries into a vehicle. In December, a woman was robbed at knifepoint by two men in a different outlet’s parking lot. Just last month a man was shot dead outside of the Walmart on the South Side.

The Chicago outlets also experienced a string of retail thefts recently, resulting in 81 arrests in ten months. But the reality is that all retail outlets in Chicago have been suffering from the same plague of crime. Multiple stores on the city’s famous Magnificent Mile have shut down and others have their windows boarded up in perpetuity.

Walmart is free to say that the city’s crime rates aren’t driving these closures and I suppose we’ll have to take them at their word. But here’s one other potentially pertinent factor to consider. The company made this announcement on Tuesday. That is only one week after Brandon Johnson, the anti-cop candidate, was declared the winner in the election to be the city’s next mayor. A coincidence? Possibly. But a company the size of Walmart doesn’t make the decision to shut down four stores overnight. They had to have been mulling this over for a while. Isn’t it possible or even likely that they were holding off on making this call until they learned what direction the city would be taking for the next four years? I don’t think we can honestly rule that out. But they might have wanted to frame it differently to avoid being dragged into local politics, particularly when they will still be operating four other stores in the city for the time being.