'Maybe we cried too much' over shoplifting, Walgreens executive says

At the Walgreens near where I live they sometimes have a security guard at the door, sometimes not. They only allow one of the two doors to open.

If the guard isn’t there you’ll see teenagers walk in, dump a bunch of their stuff in a backpack, grab as much as they can carry, and walk out. They come back five minutes later and do it again.

This is with a lot of staff on the floor, who recognize them when they come back in.

The staff have likely been told not to try to stop them, because it’s a liability for Walgreens. The security does seem to help but even that doesn’t completely stop people from trying. I have seen the security follow people they recognize into the store and then end up chasing them out but the perpetrators still get away. Even more security might help to block the door in that case, but that’s the only useful mitigation I’ve seen in these cases.

I live a few blocks away from a Walgreens that is now closing at the end of the month. I've personally witnessed a shoplifter actively shoplifting nearly every time I was in the store over the past year to year and a half. This was a half dozen encounters at least, of varying degrees of audacity from teenagers stealing some makeup to outright crews doing a mini flash mob style raid.

In every case staff (and security) were tailing them, and in one instance outright confronting them nearly to the point of physically blocking them. The shoplifters do not care - they know they cannot be touched by store employees, and they also know the police literally will not show up to the call. These are folks filling up entire baskets full of high value items for obvious resale while everyone simply lets them do it.

Perhaps this is an outlier, but based on talking to employees, seeing it with my own two eyes, it's fairly clear to me Walgreens Corporate is simply walking it back and taking an L in these locations vs. bothering to step into a hyper-partisan political topic.

This is a wild shift in societal norms and values from when I was working retail jobs in the mid to late 90's. We were enabled (and willing) to outright physically detain shoplifters to the point of physical restraint if they fought back. Police and prosecutors would have our backs strongly. This rapidly changed towards the end of the 90's into the early 00's.

Society starts failing when the answer to every problem is call mommy and daddy (the police) and stops enforcing basic societal norms by itself. We are witnessing the transition from a high trust society to a low trust society in many areas of this country.