Safeway San Francisco 2020 Market St closing at 9 PM

[storewanderer]

People like to criticize the store for locking things up and closing early, but does anyone offer any solutions?

How should these problems be solved? What should be done? Is the city at fault? Is it the state?

There were solutions implied in the article. The solution is the company makes billions of dollars in profits so they can afford this.

Someone has to do something. The store will try to do what it can to keep the store open. Cutting hours, locking products up (which causes a labor increase and a sales decrease), etc. may be temporary solutions but it is questionable if those things will work in the long term.

[storewanderer]

Some of the quotes in that article are highly disingenuous. A large store on a large lot in urban San Francisco is expensive real estate. Simply from the perspective of earning a return on that asset, Safeway would want to be open whenever there is enough demand. There's no way that they want to have to close this store anytime before midnight. I was in that store earlier this year. It's on a busy street in a busy neighborhood located near plenty of expensive urban houses. In a normal environment, there is no way that store would close at 9 p.m. It's not helpful for people to be questioning whether theft is a problem or questioning Safeway's motives. They need to be careful not to make this too much of a headache for Safeway. As we all know, there's plenty of precedent for retailers simply closing down problem locations in SF.

I expect Safeway will make changes necessary to keep the store open. The question is just what changes end up happening. Do you convert it to a "discount" format, stop selling liquor, cut out certain high theft categories or severely limit SKUs in such categories? It is a landmark store for the chain, large and high volume. Safeway has about 15 stores within the City of San Francisco so this isn't a situation where a cut and run from this one location would relieve them of the issues.

[veteran+]

It would be nice to keep the racist talking points out of this forum.

Coprorations, media, blogs, industry and trade orgs love to blame everything on poverty, racisim, homelessness, income challenged neighborhoods, certain political parties, etc..

It is way more complicated than those easy to go to "broad stroke" explanations. There is NO one here that is qualified or credentialed to expalin any of it.

Bottom line is that there are companies that succesfully mitigate these challenging issues (they are rarely reported on). It's not easy and it's not cheap.

The easy ways are to close stores or increase prices or deny and reduce services, etc. and any combination thereof.

[storewanderer]

It would be nice to keep the racist talking points out of this forum.

Coprorations, media, blogs, industry and trade orgs love to blame everything on poverty, racisim, homelessness, income challenged neighborhoods, certain political parties, etc..

It is way more complicated than those easy to go to "broad stroke" explanations. There is NO one here that is qualified or credentialed to expalin any of it.

Bottom line is that there are companies that succesfully mitigate these challenging issues (they are rarely reported on). It's not easy and it's not cheap.

The easy ways are to close stores or increase prices or deny and reduce services, etc. and any combination thereof.

One concern I have is the mentality of people in the area, you see it in some blogs and other stuff written about this store. In this form you have a full service even somewhat upscale store that is in a high income area and high income customers do not like to put up with this kind of an environment in the store. Many just say they "hope another grocer will come into the area." Okay- who? Whole Foods is nearby. Who else is developing new grocery stores in San Francisco? Trader Joe's? Okay- they will open a store that is 1/6 the size without any service departments, no drugstore type items/laundry detergent (which appear to be categories that are major targets of the theft), and few high dollar items that are prone to theft. Maybe that type of format is the answer here but will those high income customers be satisfied? You don't hear a peep about problems with the two FoodsCos Kroger has in San Francisco which are in tough neighborhoods but it doesn't seem like they are in an expansion mode.

The fact that Target with best in the industry loss prevention and surveillance can't make things work in San Francisco unless closing at 6 PM sounds alarms that have not been sounded before in the history of US retail. I've been in San Francisco many times in the evening and people are out shopping at night. A 6 PM closure for a mass merchant in this type of high rent area with a lot of people out at night is unthinkable to me, especially during the summer and holidays, especially when surrounding retailers are open past 6 PM.

A 9 PM closure for a grocery store is perhaps something you could run sales numbers on and say look- we have lower than average transaction amounts after 8 PM and theft seems to be higher after 8 PM. We still need labor in the store to clean, etc. from the day so closing at 8 PM is too early but by 9 PM we can get the 20 people working perimeter out of the store and let's just close the whole thing and lock the night crew in the store. We will see if this 9 PM closure accomplishes whatever they are trying to accomplish.

[CalItalian]

S.F. Safeway adds barriers to deter shoplifting amid Bay Area retail theft debate (includes photos)
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/ ... 675205.php

[storewanderer]

S.F. Safeway adds barriers to deter shoplifting amid Bay Area retail theft debate (includes photos)
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/ ... 675205.php

In the 80's and 90's it was not unusual for grocery stores to have those metal turnstyles that you had to enter through. Then to get out you had to actually go through a checkstand. I believe they were generally removed to help open up the spaces, create a more welcoming feel, and for accessibility concern reasons.

Some Wal Marts installed barriers that look just like what Safeway installed and I am going to say it does not appear to do much to deter theft/shoplifting as I have seen people go out through them many times, an alarm goes off, and they still leave. Some Wal Marts have actually removed them as they decided it wasn't accomplishing anything and it was also a hassle for employees entering/exiting the store. Plus those trying to shoplift etc. just went through closed checkstands. Other Wal Marts still have them.

Looking at San Francisco, If you have criminals who are so aggressive they will break windows, vandalize businesses, I do not think going out through the exit of the barrier and hearing an alarm go off is going to be much of a deterrent. They'll already be out the door by the time the alarm starts going off. I am afraid the next thing to try is to stop selling the items that are heavily shoplifted, or only offer the smallest size packages and keep few out on the shelves.

After watching the jewelry store video where they go in right when the shop owner is there and break into the cases, I am a little concerned for employee and customer safety with the "locking cabinet" type aisles. My concern is you will have a group of shoplifters who show up at the HBA/OTC aisle, wait for the clerk to open it up for a customer to get something, then overwhelm the clerk and customer and wipe the open area of the cabinet out.

[Alpha8472]

I can see many flaws with this design. The fences are too low and shoplifters can jump over them. The gates are also the kind you can just walk through. An alarm noise will not stop anyone.

Some changes are needed such as a higher fence that you cannot jump under. The next will be to change the gates to the 7 foot tall iron maiden New York subway turnstiles. Only one person at a time can go through and you have to push through a giant metal contraption. This cuts down on mob robberies and limits how much a shoplifter can carry out.

There can also be a disabled or wheelchair door where you get buzzed in by employees.

The San Leandro downtown Safeway has a different setup. There is a liquor store inside the Safeway that keeps all the liquor and the most shoplifted items such as detergent and health and beauty items. It is like a store with high unclimable walls. There are 2 Checkouts inside, so you that have to pay for your items before you leave the liquor store.

I see these deterrents as ways of cutting down on theft, but they do need improvements to make them more effective.

[HCal]

I hate those barriers. Some Walmarts in my area have them, and most Aldis I have been to have a one-way entrance where you have to go through a checkstand to exit. What if I want to leave without buying anything? My choices are to climb over the barrier, awkwardly walk through a checkstand that someone else is using, or find an employee to let me out.

The "store within a store" concept might have more potential. I remember one Kroger near the Atlanta city center has that, maybe it's common in urban areas in the south. The one I saw was quite large (a few entire aisles right in the middle of the store) but I don't think it had separate checkstands.

[ClownLoach]

First off, I am always infuriated when the media says there isn't data on theft. The store takes inventory. There's the data. Where it gets sticky is that generally Wall Street hates to hear about shrink in quarterly earnings reports and anywhere else because they consider it completely preventable by good management (little do they know) - so publicly traded retailers try to cover it up. That is why Loss Prevention departments hesitate to report even when they are comfortable with the case because they know that is a public document and could leak out eventually, such as the news magazine a few years ago that ran the cover story about how Walmart stores in small towns generated the gross majority of all calls for law enforcement services and how they had to add officers at government expense to service all the Walmart incidents. The reporters searched databases of police reports to factually support the story and Walmart stock was negatively impacted. Wall Street needs to stop telling retailers how to operate. The fact is that if Albertsons allowed the DM up there to give inventory results showing what assuredly are double or triple digit increases in shrink to get the attention of law enforcement and the public - it would have more of a negative impact on the stock and company market cap than if a catastrophe destroyed all the stores in a region. If Wall Street gets angry and the stock drops a buck - that could represent a loss in the millions of dollars if the company has been buying back their own stock now it is the double whammy of an earnings loss that will result in another stock drop and initiate a death spiral. That's why nobody can share the truth about shoplifting.