Times Square Rite Aid Closes after $200K in Shoplifting Losses By Kyle Smith
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/times-square-rite-aid-closes-after-200k-in-shoplifting-losses/
EXCERPTS
Now the neighborhood isn’t feeling so safe anymore due to the city’s new hands-off policy for criminals. In the ground floor of the building on Eighth stands a large, formerly busy Rite Aid where I used to get sandwiches and Snapples on the way to the theater or a movie. Now the place has been driven out of business, effective February 8, thanks to a wave of shoplifting (reportedly costing the store $200,000 in two months) that the city is uninterested in fighting off. Bail-reform laws, combined with the disastrous policies being enacted by Manhattan’s new D.A. Alvin Bragg, are making the city a playground for criminals again. In the Black Lives Matter riots of 2020, the Rite Aid store was looted to the tune of $60,000, then boarded up for days. It takes up a huge space, and if it should stay boarded up for long, a 24-hour establishment that helped keep the neighborhood safe will be replaced by a long, scary, vacant dead zone that will surely attract derelicts.
All over the city, chain drugstores have taken to placing items that cost more than a few dollars behind locked plexiglass. Shopping for, say, a jumbo bottle of Tide is like going to a jewelry store. You need to summon a clerk if you want assistance. Then when you get to the counter, you remember that single-use plastic shopping bags are banned. Probably not since the Dinkins era has this city been so dispiriting, so enervating, so generally wretched and off-putting and surly.
Empty storefronts are scarring prime real-estate locations all over Manhattan as businesses grapple with the new realities of the 2020s. Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul continues to repel tourists and office workers by keeping in place a statewide indoor masking mandate. This city has been through a lot, and though new Mayor Eric Adams has taken it upon himself to be its biggest booster, it’s hard to see things returning to normal anytime soon.
Comments are closed.
