Target CEO: Our Stores Are Plagued by "Violent" Incidents; We're On Track to Lose $1.2 Billion This Year Due to "Widespread" Shoplifting

Couldn't be happening to a nicer transgenderism-for-children promoting Woke corporation.

I wonder if all of these corporate c***s***ers are still proud that they virtue-signaled their support of St. George Floyd and donated to Black Lives Matter

Target (TGT) has become a target for major thefts, and it's taking a huge chunk out of profits.

The retailer estimated in its earnings release Wednesday that inventory shrinkage -- mostly the theft of merchandise -- would clip profits by a whopping $500 million this year. Factoring in an about $700 million profit hit from inventory shrinkage in 2022, Target is on pace to see $1.2 billion in profits go up in smoke, due primarily to organized retail crime.

Target Chairman and CEO Brian Cornell says the problem is getting worse, is nationwide, and across various merchandise departments.

"The unfortunate fact is violent incidents are increasing at our stores and across the entire retail industry. And when products are stolen, simply put they are no longer available for guests who depend on them," Cornell said on a call with reporters.

"Left unchecked, organized retail crime degrades the communities we call home. As we work to address this problem, the safety of our guests and our team members will always be our primary concern. Beyond safety concerns, worsening shrink rates are putting significant pressure on our financial results," he said.

The problem of organized retail crime has only grown worse in recent years, as thieves look to secure goods and sell them cheaper to consumers in an age of elevated inflation.

Weird, I don't remember this rampant thieving starting with Biden's hyperinflation.

I have a pretty strong memory of it starting after states decriminalized theft, and Soros DA's stopped prosecuting thieves.

The huge spike in murders began at the same time as the beatifiying riots for St. George Floyd -- nearly to the day.

Goods stolen from stores, which contributes to inventory shrinkage, led to $94.5 billion in losses in 2021, up from $90.8 billion in 2020, according to a late-2022 study by the National Retail Federation (NRF).

About 32.8% of companies surveyed called out organized retail crime as becoming "much more" of a concern in the last five years.

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The contentious situation has caused big retailers to vacate certain high-crime cities such as San Francisco in 2023.

Nordstrom (JWN) recently followed Whole Foods in exiting a key location in San Francisco, citing concerns over worker safety.

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Target declined to say whether it would close stores in high crime cities. Cornell said he doesn't want to close locations, given their importance to the community.

As Target decides whether to vacate these hotbeds of crime, it said would look to improve worker training and add more "asset protection" employees to the locations. The company -- similar to other big-box chains -- has also resorted to locking up items like mouthwash to reduce theft.

"So it is widespread, and I can tell you, as I talk to my retail peers, is that it's a common theme across all of retail. It'll vary by market, individual store, but the trends have been very persistent. And year on year we continue to see increases [in theft]," Cornell said.

A couple of weeks ago, John Sexton wrote about a San Francisco Target getting hit by thieves ten times per day.

And we're not talking about shoplifters. We're talking about people who bring laundry sacks and wheeled luggage into the stores to just fill them to the brim before brazenly walking out.

Last week I wrote about conditions that forced Whole Foods to close its flagship store in San Francisco. Contrary to some published claims that the closure was the result of poor sales, a NY Times review found there had been 568 calls to 911 in just 13 months. Employees had been threatened with guns and knives and theft was constant.

Today the SF Standard has a story about a Target store located in a mall near Union Square. Just like the Whole Foods, this store is being robbed blind and not just once or twice a day.

"I'd say 10 thefts a day," said one worker at the Target inside the Metreon, a mall near San Francisco's Union Square. The worker spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not have permission from a supervisor to talk to the press.

"Every 10 minutes you see it," another worker said who also did not wish to be named. "Look in some corner of the store and you'll see people shoveling stuff into a bag, food, cosmetics."...

A third worker who also spoke on the condition they not be named said lipstick and nail polish, which are not locked behind plastic, are regularly stolen in handfuls.

So if you're wondering why so many retail stores keep announcing closures in the city, this is why. Recent closures include an Anthropologie store, an Office Depot, two Nordstrom stores and a Saks Off 5th outlet. Yesterday, two more stores in the same area as the Target described above announced they were closing.

This is what a Doom Loop looks like:

The San Francisco Chronicle revealed yesterday that nearly a third of the city's commercial office space is currently vacant.

Downtown San Francisco is experiencing its worst office vacancy crisis on record, with 31% of space available for lease or sublease. In the heart of the city, an astounding 18.4 million square feet of real estate is available -- enough space to house 92,000 employees and the equivalent of 13 Salesforce Towers...

The surge in empty offices means plenty of options for tenants, a major change compared to early 2020, when the vacancy rate was around 4%...

John Sexton pointed out this article last week, about the "Urban Doom Loop" in San Francisco.

The writer wasn't trying to join the pile-on dying blue cities. She intended to rebut claims that they were dying.

But after looking at the evidence and considering her own experiences -- she decided she couldn't deny that blue cities are in the advanced stages of a "doom loop" -- a vicious circle in which crime drives out businesses and restaurants, thereby causing the high-income earners who live in cities for their high-end shops and restaurants to flee. This leads to more businesses and restaurants closing -- due to reduced clientele -- and then more well-to-do people leaving the cities. Etc.

The Urban Doom Loop is real, and it's spectacular.

A week earlier, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article: "Cities Are Struggling. San Francisco Could Be in the Biggest 'Doom Loop' of All." The phrase "doom loop" was recently repopularized by Arpit Gupta, a finance professor at NYU, in a paper he wrote last year with two Columbia B-school professors called "Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse," about the consequences for American downtowns of workers remaining remote.

The doom-loopy vision laid out for downtown SF was not pretty: Workers don't return, offices remain empty, restaurants shutter, transit agencies go bankrupt, tax bases plummet, public services disappear. According to research from the University of Toronto, cell-phone activity in downtown SF is 32 percent of pre-pandemic levels. That number is 75 percent in New York.

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A note to my fellow San Franciscians: I'm sorry. I know. There's always some story in the east-coast press about how our city is dying. San Franciscians hate--HATE--these pieces. You're a stooge and a traitor for writing one. When I set out reporting, I wanted to write a debunking-the-doom piece myself. Yet to live in San Francisco right now, to watch its streets, is to realize that no one will catch you if you fall. In the first three months of 2023, 200 San Franciscans OD'ed, up 41 percent from last year."It's like a wasteland," the guard said when I asked how San Francisco looked to him. "It's like the only way to describe it. It's like a video game -- like made-up shit. Have you ever played Fallout?"

I shook my head.

"There's this thing in the game called feral ghouls, and they're like rotted. They're like zombies." There's only so much pain a person can take before you disintegrate, grow paranoid, or turn numb. "I go home and play with my wife, and we're like, 'Ah, hahahaha, this is SF.'"

The next day, I drove over to talk to Michael Lezak, a rabbi who works at Glide, a church and social-justice organization in the heart of the Tenderloin, a block from the Nextdoor office.

When I arrived, Glide was running a harm-reduction clinic in front of the sanctuary, connecting people to same-day Suboxone prescriptions. Lezak said, as rabbis often do, "I'm going to tell you a story." Before Glide, he led a congregation in wealthy suburban Marin. Then he started here. "I open the door of my Sienna minivan. I'm 48 at the time. I see human feces all over. I see people face down on the pavement. My rabbi self does not know if that dude is alive or dead, right?"

After three weeks, he walked into the executive director's office. "And I'm like, 'Rita, I have to quit, man. I'm out. Why are my tax dollars not paying for that guy to get help?' And she's like, 'Yeah, I know. Sometimes I gotta take a walk. Sometimes I gotta get a drink. Sometimes I gotta leave the Tenderloin.'" Often we mistake our own discomfort for threat. "Then she flipped it on me. She's like, 'How do you know you're not looking at the face of God?'"

Good point.

The city often seemed to operate like an incompetent parent, confusing compassion and permissiveness.

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The city continued looping. The Whole Foods on Mid-Market closed a year after it had opened. People kept threatening employees, melting down in aisles, OD'ing in the bathroom. What could you do?

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Meanwhile, the Blick security guard kept texting me videos. He needed someone to see what he was seeing out there, on his patch of Market Street, between Fifth and Sixth. Did I know how the black markets worked? Had I walked down Market Street at night? Did I know that some of the street addicts were rotting, literally: their decomposing flesh attracting flies. The Anthropologie, where he used to work, announced it would close. "What it really feels like living in San Francisco is that you're lying to yourself," he said. "Oh, I live in San Francisco. It's so nice. When you walk by the junkies you're like, They don't exist, they don't exist. You're lying to yourself."

...

Now, it was clear tech wouldn't save us. Tech wouldn't even stay in town. I rode the bus around the city, scribbling in my notebook: face of god, face of GOD, trying to keep myself open to the world as it fell apart.

She's saying "face of GOD, face of GOD" to herself, like a mantra or a prayer, to attempt to put a heavenly sheen on the depravity and violence and public ODing and public defecation that is now the reality of her life.

A prosecutor in Illinois has announced that he's quitting after twenty years of putting the bad guys in jail -- because Illinois no longer has any interest in putting bad guys in jail, but wants to pay prosecutors to pretend they're trying to do just that.

To my colleagues:

After 20 years, I always kind of figured an email like this would start with "It is with a heavy heart that I leave..." The truth is, I can't get out of here fast enough.

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Why could that be? The simple fact is that this State and County have set themselves on a course to disaster. And the worst part is that the agency for whom I work has backed literally every policy change that had the predictable, and predicted, outcome of more crime and more people getting hurt.

Bond reform designed to make sure no one stays in jail while their cases are pending with no safety net to handle more criminals on the streets, shorter parole periods, lower sentences for repeat offenders, the malicious and unnecessary prosecution of law enforcement officers, overuse of diversion programs, intentionally not pursuing prosecutions for crimes lawfully on the books after being passed by our legislature and signed by a governor, all of these so-called reforms have had a direct negative impact, with consequences that will last for a generation.

Many years ago my family found a nice quiet corner of the suburbs. Now my son, who is only 5, hears gunfire while playing at our neighborhood park, and a drug dealer is open-air selling behind my house (the second one in two years). If it were just me to consider, I'd stick it out. I've been through stupid State's Attorney policies before. But this Office's complete failure to even think for a moment before rushing into one popular political agenda after another has put my family directly in harm's way.

The current people in charge of this state, including the [State's Attorney's Office] suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding...we live in a society with adversarial court and criminal justice processes. Defense attorneys, legal aid clinics, Public Defenders, defendant advocate groups...they fight like hell to protect the rights of criminal defendants. And they should. Their work is as noble as ours. But we have an obligation to fight like hell on behalf of the People... Once we start doing too much of the defense's job, once we pull our punches, once we decide that it's worth risking citizens' lives to have a little social experiment, that balance is lost. The unavoidable consequences are what we are witnessing in real time, an increase in crime of all kinds, businesses and families pulling up stakes, and the bodies piling up; the whole time with a State's Attorney who insists that there is nothing to see here, and if there is it must be someone else's fault. And then they wonder why they cannot retain experienced prosecutors or even hire new ones...it's because any true prosecutor recognizes the importance of this balance, and that they will not be permitted to be a prosecutor under this administration.

I will not raise my son here. I am fortunate enough to have the means to escape, so my entire family is leaving the State of Illinois. I grew up here, my family and friends are here, and yet my own employer has turned it into a place from which I am no longer proud to be, and in which my son is not safe.

...

Thank you all so much for this opportunity to serve. I will treasure every moment of this chapter in my life. Be safe, be well, fight hard.

Jason F. Poje
Assistant State's Attorney

Billion This Year Due to "Widespread" Shoplifting&bodytext=Couldn't be happening to a nicer transgenderism-for-children promoting Woke corporation. I wonder if all of these corporate c***s***ers are still proud that they virtue-signaled their support of St. George Floyd and donated to Black Lives Matter Target (TGT) has become...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace at 01:02 PM

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