Rampant Theft Causes Walgreens to Close SF Stores, Chicago to lose 1/3 of Police Force?, Can a Group of Farmers Fix High Meat Prices?, Kidnappers in Haiti Demand $1M (The Five for 10/19/21)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
It’s a very news-filled day. Let’s get into it.
[one]
If something doesn’t change, up to 1/ 3 of the Chicago Police force would be fired over the city’s vaccine mandate.
At least two memos have gone out since Friday’s deadline for all city workers to report their vaccination status to the city, but Fraternal Order of Police President John Catanzara said thousands of officers are still refusing to do so.
“The unofficial number we have is about over 3,200; so about of third of the department,” Catanzara said.
Catanzara has said the mandate is illegal, because the city didn’t negotiate terms with the union.
He said officers who are still refusing to report their vaccination status will be called in by supervisors on Monday, and once again will be asked will be asked to comply with the mandate.
“If they refuse, it sounds like they’re going to go into a no pay status, effective immediately,” Catanzara said.
He said the dispute with the Lightfoot administration is no longer about the vaccine, or personal beliefs, but collective bargaining rights.
“All of those things are a change in your employment policies. You have to negotiate with us what that looks like. The city has refused to do that,” Catanzara said.
This year, Chicago has experienced the highest murder rate since 1996, with 524 people killed in the city so far.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot accused officers of “insurrection” in a press conference this week:
"What we've seen from the Fraternal Order of Police, in particularly leadership, is a lot of misinformation, a lot of half truths, and, frankly, flat out lies in order to induce an insurrection. And we're not having that."
Since her election, Lightfoot has had an unstable relationship with the city’s police department, which has become increasingly obvious. In August, Lightfoot visited a wounded officer in the hospital, and Chicago PD turned their backs to the Mayor.
[two]
June 15, 2021, a man rode a bike into a San Francisco Walgreens, filled a bag with stolen merch and rode back out.
Last year, San Fransisco D.A. Chase Boudin announced in a virtual town hall relaxing prosecution of some crimes, including shoplifting.
A year later, an unintended consequence of that policy is happening in The Golden City…less stores.
Walgreens said Tuesday that it will close five more stores in San Francisco next month because of organized retail theft in another blow to a city that has earned an embarrassing reputation for widespread and brazen shoplifting.
The stores will close down next month, SFGATE reported. It said Walgreens has closed at least 10 stores in the city since the start of 2019.
"Retail theft across our San Francisco stores has continued to increase in the past few months to five times our chain average" despite large increases in security, Walgreens spokesperson Phil Caruso said.
San Francisco Supervisor Ahsha Safai said he was devastated by the loss of a Mission Street store that "has been a staple for seniors, families and children for decades."
"This is a sad day for San Francisco," Safai told SFGATE. "We can't continue to let these anchor institutions close that so many people rely on."
Last year, Walgreens closed one store where the chain said it was losing $1,000 a day to thefts.
Frustration and fear over thefts have been fueled by widely circulating images of shoplifting caught on video. This summer, shoplifters in masks carrying armfuls of designer handbags sprinted from a downtown Neiman Marcus department store and into getaway cars.
To better understand this, let’s run some numbers.
The average Walgreens location does $8.5 million in annual sales, or $708,333 monthly. Broken down further, that’s $22,849 in daily sales.
Assuming a 50% retail markup, that’s just $11,424 in profits per day to cover wages, utilities, repairs, etc. Out of that number…$1,000 per day in theft is nearly 10% of the money left over to actually run the store and grow profits for hiring more employees, adding new locations and rewarding investors (in a publicly traded company, anyone who owns stock).
The $1,000 doesn’t include damages done by those who are stealing, so it makes sense Walgreens pulled the plug.
Tragically, this hurts the poor the most. While living in Kenosha, WI, I witnessed the closest grocery store to our apartment close after a corporate merger. The store was close to the proverbial “other side of the tracks” and I frequently saw people walking home with their groceries. I can’t tell you what happened to those folks after the grocery store shut it’s doors, but my best guess is they were either forced to take a bus across town or bought garbage junk food from gas stations and liquor stores (probably both).
There’s certainly been a history of over-prosecution of minor crimes in some parts of the U.S., but D.A. Chase Boudin’s lax policy on not prosecuting shoplifting…appears to have done dramatically more harm than good.
Boudin’s policies closed drug stores which seniors and the poor depended on for food and medical needs.
Walgreens is a giant corporation, and will be fine. The criminals who got away with robbery…obviously face no consequence. Boudin has experienced little backlash so far.
But the people who depended on a store within medicine and a few groceries within walking distance…what happens to them now?
[three]
As food prices are skyrocketing, farmers are getting less money every year for the food they produce.
A big part of this terrible situation is the near-monopoly on meat packing, an industry controlled by just a handful of players that functionally locks out new competition.
One farmer decided to stop complaining about this situation…and raise $300 million to change it.
Like other ranchers across the country, Rusty Kemp for years grumbled about rock-bottom prices paid for the cattle he raised in central Nebraska, even as the cost of beef at grocery stores kept climbing.
He and his neighbors blamed it on consolidation in the beef industry stretching back to the 1970s that resulted in four companies slaughtering over 80% of the nation’s cattle, giving the processors more power to set prices while ranchers struggled to make a living. Federal data show that for every dollar spent on food, the share that went to ranchers and farmers dropped from 35 cents in the 1970s to 14 cents recently.
It led Kemp to launch an audacious plan: Raise more than $300 million from ranchers to build a plant themselves, putting their future in their own hands.
"We’ve been complaining about it for 30 years," Kemp said. "It’s probably time somebody does something about it."
Crews will start work this fall building the Sustainable Beef plant on nearly 400 acres near North Platte, Nebraska, and other groups are making similar surprising moves in Iowa, Idaho and Wisconsin. The enterprises will test whether it’s really possible to compete financially against an industry trend that has swept through American agriculture and that played a role in meat shortages during the coronavirus pandemic.
The move is well timed, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture is now taking a number of steps to encourage a more diverse supply in the beef industry.
[four]
A group of North American missionaries in Haiti are being held by an organized crime syndicate, demanding a steep ransom.
The gang that kidnapped a group of 17 American and Canadian missionaries in Haiti has asked for $1 million each for their release, a top Haitian official told CNN Tuesday.
The 16 American citizens and one Canadian were kidnapped by the powerful "400 Mawozo" gang on Saturday after visiting an orphanage in Croix-des-Bouquets, a northeast suburb of the capital Port-au-Prince, over the weekend.
Their abduction is part of a wave of indiscriminate kidnappings that has become more brazen as the country suffers from political instability, civil unrest, lack of quality healthcare and severe poverty.
Haitian Justice Minister Liszt Quitel told CNN the kidnappers have demanded a total of $17 million for the group's release and that they were being held in a location outside the suburb.
The missionaries are affiliated with the Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, which says the abducted group is made up of five men, seven women and five children.
Quitel said the five children abducted include an 8-month-old baby and children ages 3, 6, 14 and 15 years old.
The kidnappers first called Christian Aid Ministries' staff in Haiti at 4:53 p.m. on Saturday, stating their ransom demands at the time of the call, Quitel added. Several calls between the kidnappers and the missionary group have taken place since then, he said.
Quitel said that both Haitian police negotiators and the FBI are advising the missionary group on how to proceed and that negotiations are ongoing. FBI agents are on the ground in Haiti assisting with the investigation but are not leading the negotiations, nor have they spoken directly with the kidnappers, he said.
[five]
As inflation continues to be a daily story in the U.S., the leading cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, is one step closer to going mainstream.
Love cryptocurrencies or hate the very idea of them, they’re becoming more mainstream by the day.
Cryptocurrencies have surged so much that their total value has reached nearly $2.5 trillion, rivaling the world’s most valuable company, Apple, and have amassed more than 200 million users. At that size, it’s simply too big for the financial establishment to ignore.
Firms that cater to the world’s wealthiest families are increasingly putting some of their fortunes into crypto. Hedge funds are trading Bitcoin, which has big-name banks starting to offer them services around it. PayPal lets users buy crypto on its app, while Twitter helps people show appreciation for tweets by tipping their creators with Bitcoin.
And in the latest milestone for the industry, an easy-to-trade fund tied to Bitcoin began trading on Tuesday. Investors can buy the exchange-traded fund from ProShares through an old-school brokerage account, without having to learn what a hot or cold wallet is.
It’s all part of a movement across big businesses that see a chance to profit on the fervor around the world of crypto, as a new ecosystem further builds up around it, whether they believe in it or not.
“The one thing you can say for certain is that the advent of the era of the Bitcoin ETF opens up the opportunity for Wall Street to make money on Bitcoin in a way that it hadn’t been able to previously,” said Ben Johnson, director of global ETF research at Morningstar. “The winners in all of this are the exchanges and the asset managers and the custodians. Whether investors win or not is a big, bold question mark.”
While I don’t give financial advice (that’s not what The Five is set up for), this is a story I recommend keeping a close eye on.
Until the next one,
-sth