Philadelphia businesses closing over increase in shoplifting

Convenience stores in the Philadelphia area are “closing left and right” in response to an increase in brazen shoplifting incidents, merchants in the city say. 

“Right now we have a lot of problems with the city of Philadelphia. We are closing left and right,” Manzoor Chughtai, the president of the Franchise Owners Association, said, according to WPVI. “Robbers are coming in, they’re just robbing the place left and right.”

Chughtai said 15-20 stores in the city have closed in recent days, noting that people aren’t stepping up to take over a store and run it.

“We have now lost about 15-20 stores in the city of Philadelphia. Nobody wants to take over the store. Nobody wants to run the business in the city of Philadelphia. Very dangerous,” Chughtai said.

Just on Tuesday night, a group of men wearing ski masks and hoodies entered a 7-Eleven in the Philadelphia suburb of Glenside, Pennsylvania, and announced a robbery, WPVI reported. 

“They walk in, boom, boom, boom, like that… they said, ‘Give us money,’” store owner Vincent Emmanuel told 6ABC.

The five men managed to push the only store clerk out of the way and grabbed as much merchandise as they could before running off. 

“It’s a scary situation. Sooner or later somebody is gonna get really hurt out there,” Emmanuel said.

Similar issues with rampant shoplifting have affected other cities in the country, most notably San Francisco. Walgreens shuttered more than a dozen locations in the Bay Area as of last year, citing “ongoing organized retail crime.”

“Due to ongoing organized retail crime, we have made the difficult decision to close five stores across San Francisco,” a Walgreens spokesperson told FOX Business in a statement in October. “Each store will transfer prescriptions to a nearby Walgreens location within a mile radius and we expect to place the stores’ team members in other nearby locations.”