Posted on 05/16/2026 11:02:33 AM PDT by Morgana
Walgreens has announced that it is closing a store in the Chatham neighborhood of Chicago. They claim that the store is losing upwards of a million dollars a year to theft, so the reason for the closure is no mystery. They say that this particular store loses more in theft than any other store.
And yet… The political leaders in Chicago, who allow thieves to run wild, are angry at Walgreens.
They caused this, with their soft on crime policies, yet they are mad at Walgreens for closing the location.
FOX 32 in Chicago reported:
Walgreens to close Chatham store after more than $1M loss, cites theft and declining sales
Walgreens executives revealed the store lost more than a million dollars last year, partly due to declining prescription sales but also a massive amount of store theft.
“Theft at this store is 16 percent,” Johnson said. “That’s four times above the company average.”
And the company explained that they tried to stop theft.
“Lock boxes help us protect the merchandise in the store. A lot of the time, those lock boxes were getting destroyed. And that’s at a great cost to the company,” said Jason Vasquez, Walgreens District Manager.
They say Walgreens was spending $400,000 a year on security guards in the store, but there were still attacks on store employees.
“We’ve had people jump across the counters, because we sell liquor behind the counter, taking liquor, cigarettes… That wears. That wears down. Not so much the financial piece but the endurance of that day in and day out,” said Lonnie Fuqua, the store’s manager.
Guy Benson of the Washington Examiner reports on the local outrage:
Walgreens is shuttering a location in Chicago, upsetting residents, and stirring fury among exploitative and complicit politicians. The way some local “leaders” tell it, the drugstore chain is acting greedily, selfishly, or even criminally.
“Walgreens should be charged with first-degree corporate abandonment,” thundered a local alderman. “It should be a crime, the way they’re treating our elders. It should be a crime, the way they’re treating our families.”…
A 16% theft rate with frequent physical attacks on employees, all despite a $400,000-per-year security expenditure, led to bleeding red ink. It was obviously unsustainable. But in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Chicago, the “problem” is Walgreens declining to forge ahead with this dangerous madness indefinitely. Politicians ask, “What about the resulting ‘prescription desert’ for community members?
Perhaps they should worry first and foremost about maintaining the rule of law in said community.
Here’s the problem for these leftist leaders in Chicago. You can’t protest reality.
The store is closing because of you. Walgreens is not the problem. You are.
Why don’t they ever lock up the sun tan lotion? S/
The bars on the windows in those neighborhoods aren’t there to keep the White people out. ha.
Watched Cash Jordan talk about this yesterday.
There are other stores still within the area. Inconvenience (but still access elsewhere) is now racism.
Wont call for the government to stop the crime or violence there though.
The aldermen and women who think this way should be charged with crimes, if anyone should.
The only difference is the counter will include a 4 inch thick piece of plexiglas and a small hole or an intercom to allow the customer to talk with the sales clerk.
This model has been in place for over 20 years in a few convenience stores in Albuquerque.
Indeed
Population growth and residential expansion in Chatham began in earnest in the 1880s with the subdivision of three small areas that constituted the community. The first permanent residents in the eastern portion of Chatham were Italian stonemasons, who in the mid-1880s built frame houses in what is now Avalon Park. When Chatham was annexed to Chicago as part of Hyde Park Township in 1889, Hungarian and Irish railroad workers inhabited the Dauphin Park subdivision, also in the eastern portion of what is now Chatham. With the 1914 subdivision of central Chatham as Chatham Fields, strict zoning codes and property standards became a characteristic feature of the entire community.
The 1920s brought dramatic increases in both property values and the population of Chatham. As new residents of mostly Swedish, Irish, and Hungarian American origin took occupancy in numerous bungalows, the population swelled from 9,774 to 36,228 by the end of the decade, and the community evolved from working class to middle class. Another boom started in Chatham toward the end of the Great Depression with the development of the Chatham Park housing complex in 1941, which stimulated the growth of Cottage Grove Avenue as a shopping district. By 1959, the mostly Jewish occupants of Chatham Park converted the complex into what was claimed to be the first cooperative rental property in Illinois.
As in many other neighborhoods in Chicago, racial transition occurred in Chatham quite rapidly. In 1950 the African American residency of Chatham was less than 1 percent. By 1960 it had jumped to 63.7 percent. Unlike many other neighborhoods, however, Chatham's experienced a relatively uncontested racial transition. While the West Chatham Improvement Association attempted to keep the area reserved for whites, other community leaders wanted to avoid the violence that occurred just to the north in Greater Grand Crossing. Several area churches, for example, welcomed blacks into their congregations, and the Chatham–Avalon Park Community Council began in 1955 to include African American residents in their organization. Owing partly to the scare tactics of some real-estate agents, however, whites left Chatham in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. The 1990 census reported 99 percent of Chatham's residents as African American.
Chatham has the distinction of being perhaps the only neighborhood in Chicago that developed from a European American middle-class community into one composed of middle-class African Americans. Middle-class African Americans were, in fact, drawn to the area precisely because of its strict property standards, high levels of community organization, and good schools. When the racial changeover was completed, African American Chathamites worked diligently to maintain the middle-class character of their community.
Some of the most successful black businesses have been located in Chatham, including the Johnson Products Company (Ultra Sheen Hair Products), the Independence Bank of Chicago, Seaway National Bank of Chicago, and a branch of the Illinois Service Federal Savings and Loan Association. Independence Bank of Chicago was one of the nation's largest black-owned banks until 1995, when it was acquired by another corporation.
Toward the end of the 1990s Chatham seemed on the brink of another transition as reports of crime, property neglect, and economic instability were in the rise. More important, the declining population—down from a 1970 high of 47,287 to 37,275 in 2000—was aging. Community leaders and residents, however, devoted their energies to a number of revitalization projects designed to assure that Chatham would remain, in the words of real-estate developer Dempsey Travis, “the jewel of the Southeast Side of Chicago.”
closure
due to diy reparations
So who raised these lawless criminal yutes? Why, the very same "elders" who now have a prescription desert. If they'd done a good job of parenting in the first place, the area wouldn't be overrun with marauding gangs. Cry me a river.
what an interesting article. Hey, Detroit used to have the most beautiful museums and an opera house
Hard to accept but urban, Democratic run locales are beyond redemption. The are unfit for decent, rational people. For the sake of America its absolutely necessary to convince the majority that any vote, anywhere, anytime is a vote to destroy the American nation. Otherwise if the lunatic Democrats take national power, Chicago will be our destiny.
There's actually a law on the books that calls this out? Hmmmmm
And yet… The political leaders in Chicago, who allow thieves to run wild, are angry at Walgreens.
“We’ve had people jump across the counters, because we sell liquor behind the counter, taking liquor, cigarettes… That wears. That wears down. Not so much the financial piece but the endurance of that day in and day out,” said Lonnie Fuqua, the store’s manager.
The base of the democrat party wants a revolution - where companies like Walgreens can be punished.
How do these "community members" even get a prescription? To get a prescription, they must see a doctor. To see a doctor (and in some states, to pick up the prescription), they have to show a government issued photo ID. But we are told by the opponents of the Save America Act, that requiring a government issued photo ID to vote is racist because people of color don't have photo IDs. They also claim that the Save America Act is racist because it would require in-person voting for most people, but people of color don't have the transportation resources to travel to the poll locations to vote. Then how do these community members get to Walmart?
So, some group is attempting to save an iconic American brand? If the country becomes a commie hellhole that kind of stuff will stop? Democrats are nuts.
“Walgreens Closing Chicago Location Due to Massive Theft, Local Political Leaders Who Enable the Crime Are Outraged”
the obvious solution is for Chicago to open and operate a replacement pharmacy and sundry store like the one that just went out of business as a consequence of being strip-mined ...
Unofficial form of reparation?
The upset people in the community should boycott Walgreens.
Oops...too late.
Back in the day when Oprah lived in Chiraq and was attending Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s so-called church, she used to pretend that she was just an everyday person and how she liked to shop at Walgreen’s.
Well, thanks to the shot, Oprah got rid of all the fat except her fat mouth and she’s living in LaLa land.
But she’s not stupid, she wouldn’t dare step foot in a Chiraq Walgreen’s.
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