Re: San Frannies retail leaving city
Author: Steamfan
Date: 07-07-2021 - 14:11
This shows how out of touch these people are with reality:
Meanwhile, local residents are angry – at the stores. When a Walgreens that had seen 18 stealing incidents in four months announced it was closing, a group of citizens started a petition demanding that it remain open.
“Walgreens Corp has an annual revenue of around $139.5 billion,” the petitioners wrote. “We think they can afford to keep needed stores like this open.”
“In the middle of a pandemic and crisis, we cannot allow profit driven greedy Corporations to further traumatize and abandon their responsibility to the community,” one signer of the petition wrote. “Shame on Walgreens.”
Do people really not understand why a company does business in one place and not another? No business will locate to an area where there is a high crime rate. By the same token why would a business keep a branch open where all the profits are going out the door? How can these people be so clueless? These people have obviously never seen the decline of a neighborhood. I have, in Chicago and Detroit. When you let people get away with little things then it emboldens them into thinking they can get away with bigger crimes making for an unsafe environment for everybody. The outcome from letting criminals get away with this behavior is the big chains with lower prices move out and the only stores left are little ones with limited stock and expensive prices. This puts an even greater burden on the people who already have limited funds to spend.
To bring this back to a railroad topic: If BART is unwilling to police their trains to keep bums and criminals out of them then the traveling public will not ride. I have never felt unsafe on a BART train but I haven't ridden one in 20 years. From the news articles I have read I doubt that I will ever ride BART again. It's funny that they want to expand to San Jose but by the time they get there will anybody want to ride? New York had this problem with the subways and turned it around with more policing. BART should take a lesson from them.