When a store closes in your neighborhood, you might express sympathy for the owner and the workers. In Roxbury, a section of Boston where a Walgreens closed Wednesday, they protested.
Demonstrators chanted “Hell no, Walgreens!” and criticized the business for putting “profits over people.”
The pharmacy stayed open an additional two weeks but the signs and chants otherwise made no difference. The closure marked the fourth Walgreens shuttering in Boston in the last two years.
“When a Walgreens leaves a neighborhood, they disrupt the entire community and they take with them baby formula, diapers, asthma inhalers, life-saving medications, and, of course, jobs,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley said on the floor of the House. “These closures are not arbitrary and they are not innocent. They are life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination.”
Pressley’s contention that Walgreens closed not because it wanted to stop losing money but because of its deep hatred of racial minorities and poor people suggests not only a profound misunderstanding of how businesses work but reflexive thinking, which is no thinking at all. Discrimination as the default criticism and protest as the default response shows the degree to which ideology puts brains on autopilot.
One reason Walgreens and other stores close in high-crime areas involves retail theft. Walgreens reported theft losses at 2.5 percent of sales in 2023’s fourth quarter, a number actually heading in the right downward direction but still crippling when one considers the fine line between profits and losses.
At a Walgreen’s in San Francisco, they chained up the freezer and placed gum, toothbrushes, and nuts behind a plexiglass protector. In Chicago, a store unveiled a new layout with two display aisles and kiosks to order products fulfilled by workers in a backroom that keeps all the goods away from all the customers, paying and otherwise.
Why did it so recently devolve to where stores lock up not just high-priced items such as razors and Red Bull but toothbrushes?
It turns out the people pointing the biggest fingers at Walgreens bear a massive share of the blame.
Take Ayanna Pressley. Even prior to the summer of George Floyd, she came out with something called the People’s Justice Guarantee, which posited that “the American legal system duplicates and maintains systems of oppression that can be traced back to slavery.” Her solution, outlined in a congressional resolution containing 62 whereases, involved ending bail, mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing laws, and “dramatically increasing diversion opportunities, community service, restorative justice programming, and treatment options that minimize court involvement and result in no prison time for most offenses where the person does not cause or intend to cause harm.”
Stores abandon urban areas not because their owners hate people of color or poor people but because many cities embrace the basic tenets expressed in Pressley’s People’s Justice Guarantee. By not prosecuting so-called petty crimes, ending bail for most offenses, and putting habitual offenders on the streets and not in a cell, criminal justice systems in many cities incentivize theft.
Just as Pressley fails to grasp that economic incentives and not protests dictate whether stores stay in business, she does not understand the predictable consequences of removing consequences for shoplifting. The same activists who pushed for the abolition of bail and not punishing violators of certain offenses should protest themselves instead of the stores they helped put out of business.
Ayanna Pressley might ponder what Walt Kelly’s Pogo once noted: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
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