The Washington Post published a story Monday about the retail exodus impacting cities around the country. It touches on some of the recent store closures in San Francisco and Portland but opens with a discussion of Giant Food, a grocery store chain located on the east coast near Washington, DC. Giant’s president, Ira Kress, is doing his best to keep all of his 165 supermarkets open but it’s not easy under the circumstances.

“To say [theft has] risen tenfold in the last five years would not be an understatement,” Kress said, noting that violence has also “increased exponentially.”…

“The last thing I want to do is close stores,” Kress added. “But I’ve got to be able to run them safely and profitably.”…

“It’s continued to escalate,” he said. “So now it’s Tide and Dove and razor blades and Olay, or roasts or shrimp or crab legs.”

And violence has become a constant worry for him.

“We used to chase shoplifters,” he said. “And you’d get the product back, and nobody would ever fight you. … I didn’t worry about somebody pulling a knife or gun on me [40] years ago.”

Last year a security guard working at a Giant store in Maryland confronted a shoplifter. She pulled out a gun and shot him.

The female customer, police said, was inside the store “attempting to commit a theft” by placing items in her backpack when the security guard approached her. The woman pulled a gun out of the backpack, police said, and shot several times at the security guard.

The security guard fired his gun back at the woman, police said.

Both had gunshot wounds when authorities arrived at the store. The security guard died at the scene of the shooting, and the woman died after she was transported to a hospital.

In addition to the theft and violence there’s also a decline in foot traffic in most of these cities thanks to more people working at home at least part of the time. But the story points out that while the retail exodus is happening in major cities, the same retailers are doing much better in the suburbs where there are fewer homeless addicts boosting merchandise to get high.

It’s surprising to me that more retailers like Giant haven’t closed their problematic locations. This isn’t happening equally at every store and the president certainly knows which stores are facing the biggest problem. How long can the successful stores keep subsidizing the locations where theft is rampant? As a long term strategy it seems like a way to drag down the whole company.

Here’s a local news report that may have prompted the Washington Post story. This highlights how some Giant stores are forcing everyone to use one entrance and exit. This is inconvenient for shoppers but means the store only has to keep security guards stationed at one door throughout the day.