JOE Rogan has warned that San Francisco will be a ghost town if retailers keep fleeing to avoid theft.
He slammed the apparent lawlessness and homelessness in the California city that’s caused shops like Walgreens to shutter.
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During an epside of the Joe Rogan Experience, Rogan said the spike in chaos has left San Francisco in a “failed state.”
“That place is wild,” he said before comedian Gabriel Iglesias added that the crime was “next level.”
Rogan noted that drivers were starting to leave their car doors open so thieves could see there was nothing inside without smashing in their windows.
“Everyone’s pulling out of there,” Rogan said after listing examples of theft.
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“Hotels are pulling out, supermarkets, chains like Walgreen… I don’t know what they do at this point.”
Retail crime has definitely heated up in San Fran as the last of three Walgreens in the Mission neighborhood was hit by brazen thieves just this Monday morning, ABC affiliate KGO reports.
The suspects smashed into the front doors before dawn, grabbed an ATM, and escaped cops after a brief car chase.
Another Walgreens store in the city had the highest rate of theft in America as three shoppers would steal every 30 minutes.
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Store managers were so desperate they started locking items up in chains to try and stop the shameless thieves.
Bosses have also hired third-party security services and put lower priced goods behind locked plexiglass to try and curb retail shrink, which is the amount of unaccounted for products.
A $112 billion issue, a spokesperson for the company previously told The U.S. Sun: “Retail crime is one of the top challenges facing our industry today.”
Though retailers across the country are wracked with theft, San Francisco in particular has struggled to rebuild after Covid-19 shattered its workforce.
Offices in the tech-heavy city have been left completely vacant as workers went remote and never returned to the expensive town.
According to real estate company Savills, the office availability rates in the US were only 9% before 2020, and now they stand at a massive 30%, Yahoo Finance reports.
John Chachas, the CEO of 166-year-old department store Gump’s, expressed the state of retail in the city in a concerning open letter to California Governor Gavin Newsom.
In the letter, he wrote that this holiday season may be their last.
“San Francisco now suffers from a ‘tyranny of the minority’ – behavior and actions of the few that jeopardize the livelihood of the many,” the letter reads.
“The ramifications of COVID policies advising people to abandon their offices are only beginning to be understood.
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“Equally devastating have been a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets.”
https://www.the-sun.com/news/9639049/joe-rogan-san-francisco-theft-walgreens/