Walgreens closing 5 San Francisco stores due to ‘organized retail crime,’ company says

Walgreens will soon close 5 San Francisco stores because of what the company calls “ongoing organized retail crime,” the company confirmed to McClatchy News on Tuesday.

The company is “not immune” to the impact that organized retail crime has had on retailers in San Francisco, Walgreens spokesman Phil Caruso said in an emailed statement.

“During this time to help combat this issue, we increased our investments in security measures in stores across the city to 46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment,” Caruso said.

Customers who have prescriptions on file with any of the Walgreens locations set to close don’t have to take any action, the company said. Their prescriptions will be transferred to a nearby Walgreens, and they can anticipate additional information in the mail.

The company hopes to relocate employees at these stores to other nearby locations, SFGATE reported.

Walgreens stores in the area have witnessed an increase in shoplifting over the past several months, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.

“All of us knew it was coming. Whenever we go in there, they always have problems with shoplifters,” shopper Sebastian Luke told the Chronicle.

“I feel sorry for the clerks, they are regularly being verbally assaulted,” Luke said. “The clerks say there is nothing they can do. They say Walgreens’ policy is to not get involved. They don’t want anyone getting injured or getting sued, so the guys just keep coming in and taking whatever they want.”

The newly-announced store closures only add to the number of stores that have already been closed. At a board of supervisors hearing in May, the retailer said it had closed 17 stores in San Francisco in the past five years because of shoplifters, MSN reported.

Other retailers struggle with the problem too.

Brendan Dugan, director of the retail crime division at CVS Health, said at the hearing that San Francisco is “one of the epicenters of organized retail crime” and that employees were discouraged from intervening with suspected theft, as such encounters could be dangerous, according to the New York Times.

But some say that responding to theft by closing the stores could hurt the community. Ahsha Safai, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors representing District 11, told SFGATE that “this is a sad day for San Francisco.”

“We can’t continue to let these anchor institutions close that so many people rely on,” Safai said.

The Walgreens stores closing are:

• 2250 Ocean Ave., which will close on Nov. 8 and transfer prescription files to 1630 Ocean Ave.

• 4645 Mission Street, which will close on Nov. 11 and will transfer prescription files to 965 Geneva St.

• 745 Clement Street, which will close on Nov. 15 and will transfer prescription files to 3601 California St.

• 300 Gough Street, which will close on Nov. 15 and will transfer prescriptions to 2145 Market St.

• 3400 Cesar Chavez Street, which will close on Nov. 17 and will transfer prescriptions to 2690 Mission St.