Walgreens in SF Got Robbed…But it’s Been Stealing From You for Years.

For normal people, $84,000 is a significant sum of money – but for corporations, it’s equivalent to coins collecting dust in a change jar. 

A local crime story has been making national headlines, seven people, primarily juveniles, allegedly stole up to $84,000 dollars in merchandise from a number of Walgreens stores around San Francisco in the span of three months. 

And I don’t care. I can’t even begin to care. Walgreens’ revenue in 2023 topped 139 billion dollars. It’s an unfathomable amount of money. Of the 139 billion Walgreens brought in, 26 billion of it was profit. 

There are aspects to the case that I do care about. Someone was allegedly carjacked, a security guard allegedly had a gun pulled on him when trying to confront the thieves. These are normal people and these people shouldn’t have to worry about being confronted by bands of roving criminals. The lives and well-being of working people will also be more important to me than the financial success of any of America’s extremely profitable, multinational corporations. 

Walgreens isn’t just a corporation, it’s allegedly a criminal entity unto itself. While several of San Francisco’s Walgreens locations were being ransacked, Walgreens was in the process of accepting a settlement with the government to the tune of nearly $107 million dollars. Walgreens allegedly charged the government, meaning us – the taxpayers, for prescriptions they never dispensed to patients. This, according to government officials, took place from 2009 until 2020. In simpler terms, Walgreens was knowingly robbing Medicare and Medicaid. 

If you are an American worker, you pay taxes into Medicare and Medicaid. Not only is this theft from us, it is actively taking resources away from legitimately sick people who actually need the medications. Walgreens committed fraud in order to steal from the sick and elderly. And yet, we’re supposed to give a fuck about them losing $84,000 to a bunch of kids who probably want to buy Air Jordans and Xboxes? You know where these kids are going to spend that money? Probably here in the Bay Area. You could argue that this may have been a guerrilla attempt at a wealth transfer from corporate America to the local economy. The money Walgreens receives is going to its shareholders. They don’t fucking live here. Well, some certainly do, but you know what I mean. 

And when it comes to Walgreens’ relationship with San Francisco as a city, Walgreens has specifically fucked over San Franciscans. That’s not me lobbing pejoratives at Walgreens to be sensational or provocative, that’s according to a recently settled court case.

Walgreens paid San Francisco $230 million because the company allegedly dispensed hundreds of thousands of suspicious opioid prescriptions to people in San Francisco without providing any investigation into the prescription or their source. This lack of due diligence was likely motivated by their bottom line. And while Walgreens contributed to the flood of drugs onto the streets of San Francisco, the bodies of those struggling with the disease of addiction flooded the city’s hospitals, morgues and sidewalks. 

Walgreens’ crimes aren’t just limited to the federal government and cities like San Francisco, they prey on their workers as well. A California court ruled that Walgreens had to pay $4.5 million in backpay that they had stolen from their employees. Wage theft is a much more serious crime than robbing a few stores that surely have insurance. When you steal someone’s paycheck, you steal their food, their quality of life, and in some cases, the roof over their heads.

When it comes to criminality, small-time crooks can’t compare to the sheer cruelty of the average Wall Street-traded company.

Corporate America isn’t a victim, we are, and we always have been…

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