adminA furious exchange caught on video shows a Black woman blasting Walgreens after she found whole aisles and everyday necessities locked behind plexiglass — a symptom of a retail world forced to choose between serving customers and defending inventory from thieves. Videos of locked candy, frozen pizzas and even condoms have circulated widely, provoking both sympathy for frustrated shoppers and outrage at the climate of lawlessness that created the problem.
Walgreens and other chains say these measures are a last resort as shrink and shoplifting soar, but the corporate response is only a band-aid on a bleeding wound; locking everything up frustrates honest customers and punishes neighborhoods that already feel overlooked. Executives have admitted that overzealous security measures also hurt sales and lead to store closures in hard-hit cities, a consequence conservatives warned would follow from soft-on-crime policies.
There’s another ugly layer: for years shoppers complained that products tailored to Black women were disproportionately locked away, a practice that earned national backlash and forced retailers to publicly reverse course on those specific items. That pressure — rightly framed as dignity and fairness — proves that consumer outcry matters, but it doesn’t erase the underlying collapse of public order that made lockups seem necessary.
Let’s be clear about why this is happening: in some urban stores theft is not occasional, it’s rampant — employees report entire shelves cleared night after night, and managers have resorted to chaining freezer doors and locking aisles to stop repeated nightly thefts. When thieves operate with impunity because local leaders refuse to enforce the law, businesses react in the only way they can: by shielding merchandise and shrinking their footprint in risky areas.
Big chains trying to juggle public relations and profitability are sending mixed messages: on one hand they promise not to lock up multicultural beauty lines anymore, on the other hand they admit locking up essentials in stores where crime is out of control. Conservative readers should understand this for what it is — companies reacting to market forces and political pressure, not moral clarity; the real solution is restoring law and order so neither customers nor businesses are forced to accept humiliation or surrender.
The bottom line is simple: hardworking Americans in every neighborhood deserve safe stores and fair treatment, not plexiglass cages or the indignity of being treated like suspects while walking the aisles. If voters want to stop seeing more Walgreenses and Walmarts chained down and boarded up, they must demand leaders who will back police, prosecute repeat offenders, and hold communities to a standard of public safety. Enough excuses — protect citizens, protect businesses, and reclaim our neighborhoods from the chaos that made these lockups inevitable.
