Walmart closed 4 stores. Whole Foods closed another, all due to theft, looting, and worker safety.
Mayor Brandon Johnson, Grocery Mogul, to the Rescue
“Will the progressive mayor be willing to stop shoplifting at his government-run stores?” asks the Wall Street Journal in its take Brandon Johnson, Grocery Mogul.
Mayor Brandon Johnson said recently the city that used to work should consider opening government-run food stores because “all Chicagoans deserve to live near convenient, affordable, healthy grocery options.” He’s upset that at least six grocery stores have closed in the past two years on the city’s South and West sides.
Walmart closed four stores in Chicago because they were losing tens of millions of dollars a year, and CEO Doug McMillon said annual losses had doubled in the past five years.
The problem isn’t corporate racism. It’s crime. In 2022 Chicago reported 54,000 thefts and a mere 4% resulted in an arrest. Of the 8,730 retail thefts, there were 1,450 arrests, or less than 17%, according to Wirepoints and the Chicago city data portal.
Questions Abound
- What will the mayor do to prevent theft at his government grocery chain?
- Will Johnson consider it the cost of doing business (supported by higher tax hikes)?
- Or will Johnson provide more police protection for the stores the city opens? And if so, what won’t get protection that now does?
- Then again, what is getting any police protection now?
That’s a lot of questions.
Meanwhile if you are a store owner in Chicago suffering huge losses to theft or if you are an individual tired of the crime and piss poor public schools, I have a suggestion: leave.
But think about where your going. Leaving Chicago isn’t enough. I advise leaving the state.
Just remember It Takes 3 Weeks to Escape Illinois, at least it did for us because all of the U-Haul rentals were leaving.
I saw all this happening 50 years ago in Detroit. Things are still OK here in small town Wisconsin. What have others learned that I learned 50 years ago? Nothing! This will end badly. The Boy Scouts taught me to Be Prepared. Are you?
Sam Brown, 1960s political radical and 1975-77 Colorado State Treasurer said: “College graduates marry college graduates. School dropouts have kids with school dropouts. Now run that out four or five generations.” Here we are, living Sam’s thought experiment.
Hey Sam,
The experts named this “Intergenerational Poverty”.
It’s why we lost the War on Poverty.
In time, the municipal grocery store will use electrocution to halt shop-lifting.
How about Kinetic energy of lead or maple? No need to wait…
Crime is going to get a lot worse. IL NO cash bail started last week. We have minors car jacking people with guns and knives and they are released to their parents. Kim Fox – The Cook County Prosecutor won’t prosecute many crimes. She doesn’t even have enough prosecutors in her office to handle what they have now. Many of them quit. The mayor has his hands full with the MULTIPLE bus loads and/or airplanes arriving DAILY with illegals/migrants that are being sent here from Texas. The mayor just approved a $29 million contract for “tent cities” to be put up for these illegals/migrants. They have approx. 2,000 illegals/migrants sleeping in POLICE STATIONS at any given time. As soon as they get them out they fill them back up. Current residents are being vocal about all this money Chicago is spending on these illegals/migrants and not for their needs. We’ll be leaving IL as soon as we can retire. We live in the suburbs but may be forced to retire early to get out of IL due to crime.
What are the underlying problems that bring about poor societies in our country. There are common sense solutions to start with and work our way in from there.
The 1st underlying problem to work on is education. We need to provide FREE tutors (NOT Teachers) every day after school. If you can’t read and/or write you’re not able to hold down a job. They need to stop graduating kids that can’t read or write. If you don’t graduate high school you get NO public assistance (free housing, food stamps, welfare, etc.)
LC,
Who is “we” and who are these pious goody good doer tutors going into bad neighborhoods teaching bad kids for free?
Not how things work. These kids, besides being dumb are also bad. Really bad. Like groping teachers, threatening them, assaulting them.
Not all kids are bad. I think the tax payers should pay for these tutors. The tutors can be High School kids that excel in the subject they are tutoring. It’s cheaper to give them an education that pay for them to be on welfare for the rest of their lives or out committed crimes.
I agree with the education part. I will part ways with you on punishment. Stick with them and keep at it.
Why not teach kids in school?
Sad to hear LC, and I truly wish the best for you!!
I have a couple I have known for years, that were going to retire from the sale of their home. They have owned it for decades, and it had grown a lot so all seemed good. A few years ago the suburban neighborhood started turning into drug labs and drug dens in many of the area homes. It happened so fast, and then the uncalled recession hit, and their home is now not worth much at all. No way to go back up, as they are fearful now about retirement and hope to just get out if possible at this point.
“Chicago’s Problem is Crime, the Mayor’s Solution is City-Run Grocery Stores”
Hey Mish, your Headline states all one needs to understand, as to where their heads are up.
On top of being clueless about the issue at hand, they then select as a fix “City Run Grocery Stores”
What part of “Walmart closed 4 stores” & “Whole Foods closed another” all due to theft, looting, and worker safety.
So are they too, going to foolishly “lock all products up”?
Are they going to position “Armed Guards” at all the Entrances & Exits?
Are All Employees now going to “Wear Bulletproof Vests”?
What’s the end game? WTF game are they playing anyway?
End game… is to make people so desperate that they will ask the government for security at the expense of liberty?
Let’s hope your wrong, because we all know where that leads…
I have this outlandish theory that if people have jobs that provide a living wage (a wage that is sufficient to afford housing and healthcare) then they won’t commit crime.
It isn’t just big cities where crime is running rampant. Springfield, MO has some of the cheapest housing in the country, but the pay there is so low, people can’t afford the housing costs. I wonder if the high crime there is related to that?
The majority of jobs being created are at corporate chain type businesses where the goal is to pay as little as possible to the employees.
They are stealing mainly non essential items. If one is stealing these types of items it has nothing to do with poverty. Adopt some Singapore protocols for dealing with theft. Problem will be solved in less than a week. I guarantee it.
A lot of non-essential items are stolen for later resale for money for food and yes drugs.
The demographic story of this decade (the 2020’s) will be:
“Boomers Search for Americana”.
I’m in the Gen X demographic and live in Boise, Idaho. A masterpiece of Americana; for now. Mish, you live in Utah and moved from Illinois. A stark difference to say the least.
We’ve obtained the America we deserve. Carry a gun if there is any doubt.
“We’ve obtained the America we deserve.”
Speak for yourself (as well as Krugman of “we owe it to ourself” infame, and other charlatans of that ilk.)
Any meaningful “we” includes me. And I don’t “deserve” any of this nonsense, since I have never, ever had anything to do with neither promoting nor championing it. I bet I’m far from the only “we” component in America whom that applies to.
Open carry in Utah at 21, in Idaho it is 18.
Mayor Johnson also wants to charge a transaction tax on the financial businesses located in the City, such as the CBOE. The tax would allegedly garner 800 million in new revenue for the city government, but has those companies considering to leave Chicago, as they say it would reduce their competitiveness. Governor Pritzger would apparently need to sign off on the Chicago tax plan.
link to zerohedge.com
Remove servers from Chicago.
install servers in Miami or Dallas.
The mayor may need to be reminded of a large financial firm called Citadel that left Chicago recently……others can easily follow
They are all roasting in the south. They may not stay.
The Walmart stores that closed due to theft never turned a profit. Walmart tried everything to stop the theft for years. The income inequality would make sense but they were stealing non essential items by and large, not bread and lunch meat so that argument blows up swiftly.
The real problem is not lack of money. It’s lack of fathers and welfare that promotes single mothers with kids from different fathers. No family values, sense of community, regard for others.
The obvious solution is to crack down on crime, but let’s see how this plan works out lol.
“The obvious solution is to crack down on crime,..”
And just as obviously: In order to be able to crack down on crime to ay meaningful degree, exactly what is arbitrarily defined as “a crime,”, or for that matter also what is otherwise “banned”, has to be severely restricted to something manageable to “crack down on”. When everything is “a crime”, “cracking down” on it meaningfully, isn’t exactly feasible.
If shoplifting and murder were the only to things banned, it would be very feasible to both police them hard, and to sentence all convicts to properly deterring punishment, like 10 years of hard, public flogging. But when there’s about a million or two idiotic “laws” on the books, that’s simply not feasible anymore. Instead, what you then end up with is complete, near 100%, arbitrary “enforcement”, based on nothing more than political whims and grandstanding. Orange state clowns prosecuting people for looking “Mexican”, and blue states ditto for voting orange.
God bless America. Our nanny state says cigarettes are fine, you want to kill yourself slowly, fine.
Opiates, well, those things kill way too quickly with zero pain, if you don’t count loved ones left behind, aka, the living.
Highly processed food, science says it will kill you prematurely, but meanwhile make you ill for decades. Nanny says go right ahead and eat all you want. Big pharmacy will sell you a pill for all your worth to help you lose the pounds. The excessive pounds put on by nanny state sanctioned Highly processed food.
No vaping please? Especially fruit flavor. Cigarette? Yes, nanny government says those ate fine, please light up 20 feet from a door.
Oh, I could go on and on. The giant brains that inhabit this blog or whatever you call it are well aware of the total bull shee at that is our government over lords and will continue to bloviate about more important issues like housing starts and such.
Your government is a blatant hypocrite and you accept it.
Good for you.
If Ronnie ray gun was in charge he’d put all the richest twats in charge and have poor people eating nothing but granola and tobacco would be a building product for affordable housing.
Thank you James.
My addictive drug of choice is sugar.
The price has been well controlled by a US drug cartel for many years.
Why does anyone care what happens in these cites?
The best thing you can do is ignore them and let them implode.
That’s what the animals want.
That’s what they vote for. Let them reap the fruits of their genius intellectual forward thinking and ideas.
If you live where I do, in Colorado, you would care. They have ruined our beautiful state by leaving their pitiful left-wing cities, bringing their politics, and moving here, infecting our once great life. AZ, UT, ID, NV, and TX all have the same problem; we are being overrun by imbeciles who think they know better, even as the cities they built are burning down.
You have had it too good for too long. You are getting what you deserve. Now the cartels will flood your states with nationals from all over the world. They will lock out your citizens by language in a manner that you can not control. Then they will start buying up your property with drug money. Then they will put the illegals into office. Then they will control your local governments. Then the cartels will tell you what to do and not to do. Then they will pass laws that make it illegal to control illegals. Then they will confiscate everything you and your heirs own and put you in prison for speaking the word they deem illegal. And your local police officer you support so much will taser you, beat you and haul you off to prison. Shall I continue?
Why in hell would you think we deserve this? Where were you? Colorado was a solidly red state until we were swamped from CA, NY, ILL, and other blue states, all looking for a better life but never considering their policies as what caused their problems.
I know several liberals who moved to the Rockies.
IOW:
They’l do exactly what government, at all levels, in the US as well as everywhere else, has been doing for at least a century. Not a lick new under the sun.
If you believe that your state is somehow immune from this growing infection, you are dead wrong. AThe democrats are leaving there own blue states and moving to red states and they are bringing their asinine political ideologies with them. Its all fun and games until YOUR own red state is now flooded with an influx of libs fleeing the destruction they helped to cause in their own failed states. They are coming. You cannot stop them. No red state is immune. So just buckle up and get ready.
We are all connected as one on the earth. What effects them, eventually effects us all. Not only our own country, but other countries. People can’t feed themselves or feed themselves poorly because of food deserts, we have to deal with it. Or it comes back to bite us.
There isn’t a country in Africa that can feed itself.
Colorado, that’s only because the affluent West has been shipping them emergency food to prevent famine and enable them to increase their populations more rapidly. It’s very apparent they can create more people faster than they can create more food.
Yup, from views of many of those ultra wide obese posteriors they’ve obviously been consuming an awful lot of food deserts.
Everyone who lives in Chicago knows we already have a government-run food store chain. It’s called Jewel. They have everything a person needs. But if you are looking for a friend, the union employees arent the most cordial. If you are also from the Chicago area, what everyone should do is go on a field trip thru the south side of Chicago, and the next day go on a field trip thru Arlington Heights in the burbs. Then ask yourself … why doesnt Arlington Heights have burned out, dilapidated buildings; drug corners; homeless in the downtown and unemployment everywhere you look? Jobs, maybe?
Work ethic versus black culture.
If you can’t control the theft problem, you won’t be able to stay open either…
This can have a tie in with societal stability. With climate change you get extreme rainfalls happening. When and where? Who knows. Its a shake of the dice with charged up weather from climate changing it to more extremes of heat, rain, snowfall etc. Neighborhoods that are poor and suffer from crime will be hit with inflationary prices at the grocery store. Malnutrition contributes to family instability and contributes to crime, and contributes to society instability.
link to climatecrocks.com
Turns out CO2 not so good for plants, or the people that plant them.
Politico.Eu:
Greece’s agricultural heartland is under water — and recovery will take a long time.
Athens is asking Brussels for aid after a violent storm brought record rainfall last week, turning the Thessalian plain — home to a quarter of the country’s agricultural production — into a vast lake.
“We’ve had the worst floods in our history. This is probably one of the most powerful storms to ever hit Europe,” Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said after meeting with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in Strasbourg on Tuesday.
–
The region of Thessaly saw more than a year’s worth of rainfall in 48 hours, inundating the fertile plain at its center. According to the EU’s Copernicus monitoring service, some 73,000 hectares — an area nearly as large as New York City — are under water.
With the plain accounting for 25 percent of Greece’s agricultural production, the threat of shortages and price hikes now looms large.
About a quarter of Greece’s wheat and barley is grown there, as well as more than 30 percent of its cotton, a third of chickpeas, lentils and pistachios, a fifth of the hay used in livestock farming as well as half the industrial tomato production.
Experts warn that with silt and mud settling across fields, the flooding could affect soil quality for years to come. Efthymios Lekkas, a disaster management expert, told state television that it would take at least five years for the plain to become fertile again.
Wow, have you ever drunk the co2 Kool-Aid? Climate change, as advertised, is propaganda; nothing about it is actual. What is true? Climate manipulation has been going on for 75 years. Governments are spraying all types of toxins in our atmosphere to change weather patterns. They have admitted this.
Plants love CO2; it’s a critical trace gas. This is why during the Jurassic period, lasting almost 100 million years, the earth was the most abundant of any period, vegetation was massive, and animals were giant. Life was at its peak, and CO2 was five times, that’s right, five times more than today.
The climate change narrative is a hoax.
Did you flunk science in school?
Do you have an actual rebuttal, or is ad hominem your only comeback? Is this how you learned science?
You have ignored the crux of GHGs, mainly co2. CO2 has benefits and yet the destructive action of co2 as a GHG way outweighs its minor benfits.
Go ahead with your ad hominem attack. It only proves you have exhausted your evidence for rebuttal.
You haven’t read the science either? Got it!
You must be a pro at following the pseudo science. Congrats!
How co2 acts in the lab is pretty much how it acts in our skies. This is why the earth is getting warmer.
My friend that is such simple causation thinking. Cause and effect is a fallacy when discussing nature. A lab does not account for the plethora of variations in our earth’s atmosphere, our sun’s radiation, and the complex nature of cloud formation and weather systems in general. Cloud formation alone is a counterweight to heat generation, which, BTW, is caused in total by our sun, not a trace gas.
Climate change is a hoax that will be used to lock down society again in the name of authoritarian control. We will see this very soon. My excellent friend, Dr Dong Su Kim, a two-time PhD holder and climate scientist for NOAA in Asheville, NC, studies climate change. In his words, climate change is a means to fund grants for programs. That is how important that issue is to them. Don’t be fooled.
Cloud formation alone is a counterweight to heat generation, which, BTW, is caused in total by our sun, not a trace gas.
You aren’t reading the science on this. Trace gases are the total reason we have an agricultural society during the Holocene. Listening to false sources just isn’t getting us the right solutions.
Absolutely correct assessment.
What exactly does the floods in Greece have anything to do with crime in Chicago?
According to some everything is globull warming related. Even the earthquake in Morocco is blamed on globull warming according to one “expert” I read last week.
My grey hair: globull warming
Tomato stain on my shirt: globull warming
Clogged drain: globull warming
Pile of dirty dishes in the sink: globull warming.
Unfortunately the ill-schooled as this person will buy anything.
Well , global warming intensifies our weather into being more destructive. Which includes growing crops, feeding ourselves and the poor trying to feed themselves. See the connection yet?
These are weather events. Not a change in climate. What places on earth have a different climate today than it had 200 years ago?
The science has pointed out weather today that was impossible 200 years ago. Start with record breaking heat waves. The simplest of all. You can google that yourself.
OK. You have a point, but give us the reasons for the said climate change. Not the CO2 or N2, but who, where is emitting those. The real culprits please.
Who is emitting those?
All of us.
Sorry for the delay, I am assuming you rare questioning me, as these strings get longer it is hard to know who’s talking to who.
First, practically all major governments are trying to control the weather through chemicals sprayed in the atmosphere, sometimes called cloud seeding. Especially the intelligence agencies. This is not hard to find if you look, they are pretty open about it. Millions of tons of chemicals to change the weather are put in our atmosphere each year. Perhaps you are familiar with Bill Gates wanting to dim the sun by spraying reflective chemicals in the layers of the atmosphere to cool the earth.
Here is a link, this guy has been aggressively explaining what is happening. A documentary was made and it is compelling. You should watch it.
President Johnson said “he who controls the weather controls the world” and that has been the desire of the US and now China.
link to geoengineeringwatch.org
This is absolutely false. The problem with you greenies is this. (please be aware that I am a earth first person and have been for 60 years). You cherry pick all your data, yes every single piece of data used in your quest to dumb -own society is cherry picked to further your silly agenda.
Fact in point. We are still climbing out of the ice age. Search for any long term chart and you will see the earth is still much cooler than history.
Fact, Decade by decade analyzed shows the 1930s as the hottest decade in the US. Those Model A were massive co2 generators I guess.
Fact, more forestry was destroyed buy wild fire in the 1900s by something as five times as today. We have more vegetation now than 1000 years! CO2 is our friend not our enemies. You want to feed the world, have more co2.
A trace gas does not cause warming (yeah yeah, its a blanket, we know the con). That is violating the second law of thermodynamics.
I have already told you about my 2 time phd holder Dr Kim. They do not care about global warming at NOAA. It is not a big deal. There are far more serious problems that need attention. The government of the world are trying to control weather. The very first weather satellite sent by the US was during the Johnson Administration, in a commencement speech he announced the launch. He also said this “he who controls the weather also controls the world”. This is our problem. You have no idea the nefarious programs the US alone commits to in the name of control. They use millions of tons of weather controlling chemicals each year in our atmosphere.
We are killing ourselves by government. Wake up dude!
I guess they must have had the same sort of recovery problem when the Nile delta flooded every year.
Dont have good nutrition, health suffers. It weakens the children, adults and society.
link to washingtonpost.com
Subsidized meals in child care tied to healthier kids and families
Every day, more than 4.2 million children receive nutritious food and snacks through the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP), a federally funded, state-administered initiative that reimburses child-care centers and home day cares for providing food to eligible kids. A new analysis suggests the program positively affects not just children but also their families, tying subsidized child-care meals to better child health and lower rates of household food insecurity.
The study, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, found children who received subsidized meals in child-care settings were 30 percent less likely to have household food insecurity, 39 percent less likely to have poor or fair health, and 41 percent less likely to be admitted to the hospital from the emergency room than their peers who ate meals provided by their parents while in care.
Climate change absolutely has an effect on crime in Chicago. Every winter the criminals jump out and yank the $2000 Canada Goose coats right off the north side idiots’ backs.
Good to see you’re not serious.
Hey Chicago, welcome to the Soviet Union, the home of the government-run grocery stores. Btw, is there any bread today?
Crime is by a minority of people that cause the rest to suffer from the effects of criminal behavior on a society. One of the effects is the food desert they have because. There are other issues going on besides good food. But its a start towards getting a sick society healthy. It is a hard job and may fail. If it is allowed to be flexible and persistent seeking solutions, I believe that a program can work. If it is locked one solution only and cannot flex, then it will fail.
How can the city turn a profit on free food? Joggers don’t pay.
Looks like the lessons of the old USSR weren’t taught or learned in America because now Chicago want’s to emulate that model.
I’d expect this government run stores to be on the level of those old Soviet stores where in theory everything was available but in practice just contained empty shelves.
Don’t forget to add that there were special “dollar” stores that were stocked to the max in many of the old soviet countries. The catch was you needed American dollars to buy in those stores. Yes inequalities exist in the workers paradises. You will always have the poor and the rich.
Everything would be free the week leading up to an election.
“Leaving Chicago isn’t enough. I advise leaving the state.”
Wise advice. But what happens if everyone in Illinois takes that advice and moves to Utah? That’s part reason why leaving Illinois isn’t enough, you gotta exit all states.
TX Gov Abbot is sending his “undesirables” to New York, Chicago, and other places so it begs the question, why doesn’t the Illinois Gov ship their criminals to Utah or other states?
I suspect it won’t be long before states start to offer “incentives” for people to move/leave the state and go elsewhere. Some states are starved for labor offer incentives for people to move to their state already but I suspect paying to make people leave will come soon enough.
Asian markets down right now, gotta run and go look for some profits…
In Utah Mitt can always give the undesirables a ride on top of his car to the next hedge fund hoodlum meeting, where they’d be in good company.
Becuase those states punish criminals whereas the Blue cities make excuses for criminals.
So where is the criminal likely to prefer living?
“So where is the criminal likely to prefer living?”
Where they can victimize people & businesses with money and if Chicago is running dry they will look for greener pastures just like any other creature.
Professional criminals prefer DC where they can actually get wealthy.
That makes sense if they’re stealing expensive items.
But most of these criminals are petty thieves and robbers. As long as ppl live in Chicago, LA, NYC etc they will be there pilfering what they can to feed their hunger and drug habits.
They’re not stealing so they can eventually buy that beach house on the Outer Banks.
After this year’s weather no one wants to live on the Outer Banks anymore.
Rural areas do not have the problems of the big cities. That makes criminal activity a little more difficult.
Of course rural areas dont have the media reach (less TV news and newspaper coverage) so we really dont know what is happening there. Rumor has it rural areas have a BIG meth cooking problem, hospitals and ambulances closing, and lets not forget that most welfare goes to poor rural people — WAY more than the big cities.
Rural areas often have more gun “accidents” with suspected criminals.
Exactly. They protect criminals. So ridiculous. Yet Chicago just keeps voting in the same people who are guaranteed to perpetuate the problem. Voting incompetent people into government office has become a whole way of life for them. Their pride just won’t allow them to admit they are voting in the wrong people. The problems will never go away, but only continue to wooden under this weak, incompetent leadership.
Gov Abbott is sending the immigrants… are u saying illegal immigrants are undesirables in your sanctuary state?
First, consider whether the mayor said anything meaningful, or whether he was spewing hot air in blaming the corporations for pulling out of those neighborhoods.
Next, the mayor may want to look at the open-air drug markets as a model; how much shoplifting happens there?
And it is easy enough to ameliorate those food deserts. How many shoplifters will lift a bunch of collard or mustard greens. Impoverished neighborhoods get a choice of poverty vegetables. So the remaining problem is the grocer retaining the money he receives against the risk of theft. Again, study street markets in Latin American favelas. How do they manage in the midst of crime?
They manage it with Punishment.
That’s something liberals don’t like unless you misgender someone or block a bike lane.
Also only allow food stamps to be able to purchase healthy food. No junk food that incites the passions.
Good luck with that. Pepsi donates a lot more money than your local apple grower.
Make that “don’t expect the party of….”
This is the typical DONORcrat Party approach of treating the symptoms rather than the disease. The disease is the extreme income and wealth inequalities that have ravaged the nation over the last 4 decades. But don’t the party of “nothing will fundamentally change” to do anything concrete about that.
If income inequality explained high rates of theft then one would expect to see high rates of theft across the nation.
Instead we see high rates of theft mostly concentrated in large urban areas where there is little enforcement and consequences for stealing and that are governed by politicians who engage in Identity and Grievance politics which often dismiss the seriousness of theft.