Walgreens to Close Store After $1 Million in Thefts
CHICAGO — Walgreens is closing its longtime Chatham neighborhood store on Chicago’s South Side, and the political class has found its villain. Not the thieves. Not the violent offenders. Not the failed city leadership that allowed a neighborhood pharmacy to become a fortress. No, the outrage is aimed squarely at Walgreens.
On his national radio show, Todd Starnes said the company is being treated like the bad guy after losing more than $1 million at the store and spending hundreds of thousands more on security. Starnes was blunt: Walgreens is not abandoning Chicago; Chicago’s lawlessness is driving Walgreens out.
The store at 87th and Cottage Grove is set to close June 4. Walgreens told local outlets the location has faced “significantly higher levels of theft and violent incidents” than other stores, making it increasingly difficult to protect workers and customers. “Safety must remain our top priority,” the company said.
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But at community meetings and press conferences, the story has been flipped upside down. Local coverage quoted one resident asking, “You’re going to tell me it’s not racially motivated?” before pointing to Andersonville, a North Side neighborhood.
“They’re not outraged over the fact that these people are coming in and shoplifting everything and stealing everything,” Starnes said. “They’re upset at Walgreens and they say Walgreens is the bad guy here.”
Ald. William Hall went further, accusing the company of racial abandonment. “You come into our neighborhood and you think you can leave us with crumbs. We’re better than crumbs,” Hall said, according to the Chicago Crusader.
Asked whether the closures were tied to zip codes, Hall said, “We know it’s a closure by color.”
That phrase — “closure by color” — is the kind of charge that can ruin reputations. But Walgreens’ explanation is not race. It is reality. CBS Chicago reported Walgreens said theft at the Cottage Grove location was 16 percent, four times the company average. Prescription volume had fallen 30 percent over five years, and pharmacy reimbursement rates were 25 percent below the company average. Lock boxes and full-time security cost the store about $400,000 a year.
The company even said security measures were not stopping people from jumping counters to steal liquor and cigarettes or threatening team members. That means the victims are not only executives reading spreadsheets in Deerfield. The victims are cashiers, pharmacy techs, elderly customers, families needing medicine, and a company being told it has a moral duty to operate at a loss in an unsafe environment.
Still, local leaders framed the shutdown as corporate cruelty. CBS Chicago quoted Hall calling it “a tale of two cities,” while Ald. Desmon Yancy said, “This isn’t an accident. This is corporate extraction.” Ald. Lamont Robinson added, “Walgreens, shame on you.”
Starnes argued the community meeting should have sounded very different: less condemnation of Walgreens and more concern about the thieves who made the store unsustainable. The question, he told listeners, is simple: should a business be forced to stay open while it is being robbed blind?
Walgreens says prescriptions will be transferred to nearby stores, with 90 days of free prescription delivery for affected customers. Team members are also being offered opportunities to keep working at other Walgreens locations.
The real scandal is not that Walgreens finally said enough. The scandal is that Chicago leaders watched crime and disorder hollow out another neighborhood business — and then blamed the store for leaving.
“It just seems to me that maybe the point of the community meeting should not have been about attacking Walgreens, but actually apologizing to Walgreens and trying to figure out how to stop all the “young scholars” from pillaging and plundering the neighborhood,” Starnes said.
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