The Retail Insurrection

From time to time we should lower our gaze from the Olympians who play lead roles in our national political drama and take a close look at what is happening on ground level.

In other words, rather than thinking that reality is what occurs in political debates, election results and court decisions, we should consider the fabric of everyday life, beginning with a trip to the pharmacy.

Pamela Paul did so in her New York Times column yesterday. She found that New York City’s pharmacies were suffering repeated smash and grab robberies, committed by thieves who had no respect for the law or for decorum. 

If you cannot shop peacefully in the pharmacy, something is wrong with everyday life in America.

Unfortunately, Pamela Paul does not have the gumption to identify the responsible parties. Her otherwise valuable article suffers from a glaring omission. Who is responsible for the current state of everyday shopping in America? 

She describes the situation well. In places where the aisles of drug stores are covered with plexiglass barriers, the shopper has lost the right to privacy:

The pharmacy is a place where people like to slip in and out unnoticed, hoping the cashier doesn’t linger over each item at checkout.

But privacy is harder to preserve now that drugstores, to thwart shoplifters, increasingly lock their stock behind cabinet doors, with buttons to push in order to get an employee’s attention. A pimply boy has to hail an employee to free his benzoyl peroxide and a 14-year-old girl needs to be watched as she selects a tampon that suits her cycle. Even for adults, it’s hard not to be self-conscious about having a store employee trail you through the drugstore like a personal shopper as you ponder which dental floss to buy.

The cost of the nationwide epidemic of shoplifting approaches $100 billion. Of course, these crimes seem mostly to be concentrated in big blue cities, cities that are led by Democratic mayors and Democratic public prosecutors. Their soft-on-crime, defund-the-police have produced this horror. 

Naturally, Pamela Paul only pays lip service to responsibility and accountability. Not a word about the criminals who perpetrate the crimes. A mere brush off for the politicians who have engineered it.

It has damaged everyday quality of life:

The most obvious effect is a sense of increased danger. Stores simply feel less safe. For a variety of reasons, police now seem less inclined to arrest shoplifters. In Chicago, for example, overall arrests for reported thefts dropped from a rate of about 10 percent in 2019 to less than 4 percent in 2022, according to Wirepoints, a right-leaning watchdog group. Of the nearly 9,000 reported retail thefts in Chicago in 2022, only about 17 percent resulted in arrests, Wirepoints said. This apparent shift in policing priorities can put increased pressure on store security personnel and frontline workers to police their own stores, even when they are inadequately prepared to do so.

Shops are closing and even major chains are moving out of downtown:

For small shopkeepers, bodegas and mom-and-pops, losses from theft can be devastating to the bottom line. Even large chains like Walmart, Whole Foods, REI and Walgreens have closed or are planning to close major retail locations in cities like Portland, Ore., and San Francisco. While multiple factors are behind the closures, shoplifting is frequently cited as one of them.

As for personal experience, Pamela Paul now finds shopping to be dispiriting:

Returning to New York City recently by train after an out-of-town trip, I emerged from Penn Station to pick up a few things in a nearby drugstore. When I walked in, the store was nearly empty, the shelves were mostly locked; no one responded when I pressed a button. It was a dispiriting welcome home and an unfortunate way to imagine first-time visitors encountering New York.

But still, the larger issue remains. Paul refuses to indict the local politicians for having produced this nightmare. And that is not an accident. 

The current wave of shoplifting has been ongoing since the spring of 2020. It began with the George Floyd riots and has continued apace. Since the perpetrators do not fit the picture of the left’s favorite narrative, since they are not white supremacists, not even radical Catholics, the media does not care to call them out for their criminal activities. 

I think it fair to call it an ongoing insurrection. It manifests the breakdown in law and order, the absence of elementary decorum and the willingness of civil authorities to allow gangs of thieves to terrorize neighborhoods.

Surely, our political leaders, especially those in the Democratic Party, and their satraps in the mainstream media, know that there is a problem. The only thing is, they blame white supremacists and they are attempting to solve the problem by indicting Donald Trump.

Yes, indeed. The frenzy over January 6 and the incontinent rage to indict Trump is a full-throated distraction. It is a cover-up designed to exonerate those who are responsible for having destroyed everyday shopping in major American cities. The more people have their minds filled with anti-Trump propaganda the more they will avoid thinking of who is responsible for the situation that Pamela Paul so ably describes. 

And, until we recognize who is responsible, and until we call the ground level insurrection for what it is, we will not fix the problem. Making Donald Trump a scapegoat for bad behaviors that he has not incited is a judicial disgrace. It is not merely judicial persecution; it does not merely violate the tenets of the American justice system. It covers up a very real problem by filling the airways with constant distraction.

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