Iconic Target Store on Mission St to Close Amid Shoplifting Tidal Wave

I love how the mayor and city council try to say crime is down and blame the stores for closing. what a shiathole

EXCLUSIVE: Iconic Target Store on Mission St to Close Amid Shoplifting Tidal Wave
SFPD tells Globe Mayor Breed falsely claims it’s not about theft, begs company to stay

By Ken Kurson, October 21, 2021 4:12 pm



Last week, after Walgreens announced that five additional outlets in San Francisco would be closing on top of the 17 that already have been shuttered since 2019, the company claimed that changes in both the law and prosecutor attitudes and made it impossible to run a profitable business in the city.

Mayor London Breed challenged that narrative. She attributed the closings to demographic shifts and the Chronicle dutifully reported that “the five stores slated to close had fewer than two recorded shoplifting incidents a month on average since 2018” (while acknowledging that few stores bother to report a crime that now routinely goes unpunished). Everyone who has stood in line at a drugstore and watched thieves shove hundreds of dollars of items down their pants knew that Breed was mistaken at best or lying at worst.



Now, in a Globe exclusive, San Francisco Police Department has revealed that the iconic Target on Mission Street between Third and Fourth Streets will be shutting its doors before the end of the year.

“This store loses $25,000 a day to shoplifting,” an SFPD officer told the Globe in lengthy, taped interviews conducted this week. “That’s $25,000 that walks out the door on average between 9 and 6 every day.”

(The Globe is redacting the officers’ names because of critical remarks made about Mayor London Breed and District Attorney Chesa Boudin that could potentially endanger their jobs.)

“This store does between $80,000 to $120,000 in sales every day. And they lose 25 of it [meaning $25,000]. Even if they’re making 25% profit, the stealing takes that down to zero.”

Asked if the presence of armed, uniformed police officers had any deterrent effect on thieves, one officer was blunt in his assessment.

“They don’t care. There’s no consequences. Literally zero consequences. I’ve kicked out… I’ve been here since 9 AM today. I probably have already kicked out eight or nine people and I’ve recovered a thousand dollars worth of stuff alone off of that. Whether we kick them out, tell them they can’t come back, whether I put them in handcuffs and take them down to the county jail—there is no difference. Because they will not be prosecuted by the district attorney. Therefore, there is nothing documented that they can’t come back here. You know, they get no time in jail to think about what they did, right? There is zero consequence. And that’s why in this store the same exact people come in every other day and in the city the same couple percent of people are the same people committing all the car break-ins, all the robberies and all the shootings, any aggravated assaults right in town where there’s more street people, people fighting. It’s all the same exact people, and there are zero consequences. Therefore you take them to jail they get out of jail. They do it again. It’s a big circle.”


Even bulky, hard-to-steal items are kept behind locked devices that require Target personnel assistance. (Photo by Ken Kurson for California Globe)
Target has already taken measures to decrease the catastrophic shrinkage. In July, the retailer cited an “‘alarming rise’ in thefts at its San Francisco stores” and cut its hours. The Mission St. store had been open from 8 am to 10 pm and is now open only from 9 am to 6 pm. One officer told the Globe the new hours inconvenienced hard-working San Franciscans who struggle to buy their diapers and Diet Cokes before 6 pm.



“Their hours, all Targets in San Francisco right now compressed their hours, right? Every store is 9 AM to 6 PM, which pisses everybody off down here because a lot of people get off work at 6 o’clock and they come in and they are like, ‘What? Target is closed?’ … ‘Yeah, Target is closed.’ It is out of control. … They are closing the one on Bush Street. There’s one on Bush and Sansome, right there. They are closing it in a month. Right before Thanksgiving. That one is closing partly because the Financial District isn’t back you know, right.”


But according to this officer, the Mission Street Target will also be closed by the end of the year despite having solid revenue, because they cannot get the shoplifting under control. “In San Francisco, the only reason why they haven’t closed. They want to have it here, right, and this is the biggest one in San Francisco.”

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