Last we had a couple of stories about the crime and shoplifting problems in San Francisco. I wrote about a sandwich shop owner named Peterson Harter who was punched in the face after telling a random drunk to stop peeing outside of this store. He made an Instagram video moments after the incident saying, “I’m f***ing fed up with this goddamn city.”

In addition, David wrote about a Walgreens store in the city where entire freezers full of food had been chained shut to prevent thieves from carting off merchandise.

Yesterday, CNN caught up with both stories. They showed a bit of the Instagram video mentioned above and they also sent a reporter out to the Walgreens. While there they learned a few things. First, according to the company, this particular Walgreens store in San Francisco has the highest rate of shoplifting out of all 9,000 Walgreens stores in the country. That’s the sort of dubious honor you probably won’t see in any brochures for San Francisco.

Second, they learned that estimates of a dozen thefts per day were not an exaggeration. On the contrary, CNN’s camera crew was there for 30 minutes and in that amount of time they witnessed three people stealing. If anything, a dozen thefts a day may be an underestimate.

The third thing they learned was the one that I found most interesting. It wasn’t the company itself that ordered this store to chain up the frozen pizza and ice cream. The reason the chains on the frozen food looked a bit out of place is because the employees came up with that on their own. Once it made the local news last week, corporate told them to take it down because it sent the wrong message. The wrong message in this case is basically the truth about running a retail business in San Francisco.

The chains on those freezers tell a pretty interesting story. Think about it. You’ve got employees who are sick and tired of having their workplace robbed a dozen or more times a day. They are not allowed to intervene or they’ll be fired. They are the ones unpacking boxes full of frozen food and stocking those freezers only to see a platoon of thieves come through each evening and treat it like a Las Vegas buffet. They got so tired of it that, without corporate approval, they put up the chains.

If Walgreens corporate knew this was happening and knew this was the worst store in the entire country for shoplifting, why weren’t they proactive? Why did the employees feel they had to act on their own? I think the answer is that big corporations care more about bad PR than they do about the theft which, on a balance sheet for the entire company, is probably just a rounding error.

The problem with this approach is that writing off what happens in this particular store makes it a pretty awful place to work. The employees aren’t looking at the big balance sheet. They are watching thieves steal every day and they know it probably means their store will be shut down and they’ll be out of work fairly soon. They want something done, even if they have to do it behind the company’s back.

Maybe there’s a lesson here about the downside to a few corporations owning all the drug stores. That creates a lot of efficiency in the business but it also means the individual stores don’t have much pride. If this store was owned by a family, you can bet they wouldn’t tolerate this and their first concern wouldn’t be PR.

When a lone business owner gets robbed or mistreated, he (or she) reacts like Peterson Harter in that Instagram video. They get angry. They want to know what the city plans to do about it. When Walgreens gets robbed blind on a daily basis no one gets mad. No one makes an angry Instagram video that goes viral. The corporations have all decided it’s better to say nothing because complaining about the homeless in San Francisco is a good way to invite protesters and boycotts.

All the big retail corporations in San Francisco are doing the same thing. They sit there and take it until they can’t take any more. Then the store closes and they issue a bland statement about the pandemic or the lack of foot traffic. Once in a while the real story will come out if the media follows up but in general the contribution of the chaos on the street to these closures gets downplayed.

People ought to be more angry than they are about some of these things. It’s ruining the city and the corporations involved are just going to shrug and move on rather than risk saying something that might piss off some woke activist in San Francisco. The only way this is going to change is if the voters get angry and really let the elected officials know they’re as fed up as the workers at the worst Walgreens in the country.