Target stores corporate may be a socialist enterprise at heart, but I will always give them points for being upbeat while they do it. Bouncy commercials for bright, happy stores packed with stupidly edgy and cheerful flotsam and jetsam you didn’t know you wanted, but caught your eye and wound up in your buggy somehow.

For all of their public leftier leanings, Target – headquartered in Minneapolis, MN – took a pretty big hit during the racially charged riots in the summer of 2020. There are two fellows now incarcerated for breaking into Target HQ and attempting to light it up…

…Court documents indicate that 24-year-old Shador Tommie Cortez Jackson will serve 33 months in prison followed by two years of supervised release.

…Jackson joined a crowd outside Target Corporation’s headquarters building located at 1000 Nicollet Mall. Jackson used a construction sign to break through the glass doors into the building. After breaching the doors and entering the building, Jackson intentionally set a fire on a counter inside the mailroom. He also attempted to light a second fire in the mailroom on top of the cardboard boxes using a lighter and a bottle of an ignitable liquid.

…after getting done stealing purses from Saks 5th Avenue.

…According to evidence during the trial, around 9 p.m. [Victor Devon] Edwards worked with Shador Tommie Cortez Jackson to steal purses from Saks Off Fifth. Edwards even texted people that he had Michael Kors purses and texted one acquaintance that he was downtown because he was “Lootin.”

About two hours later, surveillance video captured Edwards and Jackson using a construction sign to break into Target headquarters. Jackson started a fire in the mailroom and Edwards added an accelerant to help fuel the fire.

Who knew anyone even got arrested, less mind faced prosecution for felonies? That was kind of news to me in all the madness of that summer.

As far as Vox and the people they interviewed were concerned during that “fiery but peaceful” summer, Target HAD IT COMING. Why? Because those corporate sumbitches had been working WITH POLICE on advanced LOSS PREVENTION for years.

…Target HQ is in Minneapolis. Lake St. Target, which got looted tonight, is literally Target’s experimental site for loss prevention & surveillance policies geared toward poor people. Very few people in the neighborhood like that Target,” security engineer Ian Coldwater explained in a tweet. “It’s also why Lake Street Target is so consistently awful in different ways to all the other ones, it’s engineered to be that way.”

…Others have dug into Target’s past to highlight the company’s work with the Minneapolis Police Department. The company offered the city “financial and intellectual support” for the city’s SafeZone program, which set up a network of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras all around downtown Minneapolis and gave radios to business owners for sharing issues in real time. That support included a $300,000 donation, and the whole program was inspired by a similar one in Northampton, England, which had used the technology to fight a crime wave and attacks from the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The SafeZone program was part of the larger Safe City program and has since become a nonprofit independent from Target. Recode reached out to the SafeZone program in Minneapolis but did not hear back in time for publication.

Over the years, Target has expanded its work with police nationwide. A 2010 report by the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement membership organization, says that “Target and local partners have started Safe City projects in more than 20 other cities across the United States.”

That’s not all. Target critics are also pointing to a 2011 article from Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) describing how the company created the Target Forensic Services Laboratory focused on investigating a range of crimes including shoplifting. The featured lab was located at Target’s Brooklyn Park campus in Minneapolis, and, according to MPR, it stayed busy “lending its high-end technology and professionals to law enforcement agencies free of charge.” The article points out that the Target lab carries the same certification used by any crime lab at a police department.

To a whole underclass of professional thieves and victimhood advocates, protecting your assets is a concept punishable by a good stiff round of down-to-earth looting and hopefully, enough flames to burn your building to the ground.

The Leftist mindset is a lovely thing.

Fast forward just a few years, and Target, for all their pink and acid green cut-out kiddie cardboard geegaws, is still serious about “loss prevention.” In some of the cities where they’ve dropped their red and white buildings, they need to be.

One of those is San Francisco, where the “petty” crime theft rate is driving businesses out, and the few customers crazy with frustration who still intend to honestly purchase merchandise.

Check out this poor fellow after a visit to the SF Folsom Target. Surprises in the box that should contain your expensive purchase are not always appreciated.

Never shop at the @Target on Folsom and 13th in San Francisco. I purchased a @googlenest there to discover @Capri_Sun were put into the box. Apparently this location is aware of the problem. They offered no help. Same goes for the “Costumer Service” over the phone. pic.twitter.com/DTkmUQnTQn

— J O S É A L B E R T O m o y e t (he / him / his) (@MrJoseMoyet) April 20, 2023

I guess the Target at Folsom and 13th isn’t quite at the point where they’re going to shut down but they did respond to the unending and repeated theft in a pretty draconian fashion.

They’ve dang near locked the whole store up.

…A San Francisco Target store has been putting all of its products on lockdown amid a shoplifting crisis that has crippled retailers in the Golden Gate City.

Footage of the store’s interior posted to TikTok Thursday showed aisle after aisle of toiletries and cosmetics under lock and key in the megachain.

While it’s common for stores to lock up small valuable items like razors, heaps of inexpensive large items like mouthwash, shampoo and lotion were also being kept out of reach of the grubby hands of would-be shoplifters, the clip showed.

It looks like the aisles from a maximum security pharmacy or something, doesn’t it? You have to get the guard with a key to help you shop for stinky Axe body spray for your tween. I wouldn’t want any witnesses to that. It’s embarrassing enough to have to check out with it. I couldn’t imagine having to retrieve it from under lock and key.

One wag said to pre-order everything on the app and just go pick it up – don’t bother “shopping.”

…The Bay Area has been especially hard hit by a national organized retail crime epidemic that ballooned during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading chains such as Walgreens to close five San Francisco stores due to theft.

The National Retail Federation’s 2022 retail security survey ranked San Francisco/Oakland as the second-most hard-hit metropolitan area by theft in 2020 and 2021, only behind Los Angeles.

The organization lists items like body wash and over-the-counter medication as items that are particularly attractive to shoplifters, who can often sell their stolen wares on the black market to smaller stores.

That’s insanity. It’s also what it takes for survival, I guess. As you’ll recall, the snazzy one-year-old, flagship Whole Foods in the neighborhood wasn’t so lucky.

Whole Foods opened a nearly 65,000-square-foot flagship supermarket in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood in March 2022. But just one year later, shoplifting and safety concerns for the store’s workers have led Whole Foods, now owned by Amazon, to close this location.

San Franciscans face about a 1-in-17 chance each year of being a victim of property or violent crime, which makes the city more dangerous than 98 percent of all US cities. To put this in perspective, San Francisco’s crime rate is about 42 percent higher than that of Compton, California, one of California’s a major cocaine distribution center that has suffered from drug-related gang violence dating back to the 1980s.

…Crime and concerns of employee safety hit Whole Foods shortly after the store opened last spring. Whole Foods employees have reported how shoplifters would enter the store with empty suitcases, fill them with high-value products, primarily alcoholic beverages, ice cream, and kombucha (a fermented drink made from tea), and then leave via a back elevator. Other employees found that the store’s restrooms had become drug-shooting stations, with used needles, drug pipes, and trash littering the restrooms, along with vomit, urine, and blood on the bathroom floors and graffiti on the walls.

Thieves with suitcases – I can’t imagine it would be any different at Target.

As one resident said in comments on Twitter when you’re paying over $3K a month for a tiny 1 bedroom apartment and have to shop under these conditions? Totally UNSAT.

Especially when there’s nothing to be done about it…

How Often Does San Francisco Deal With Shoplifters?

We’ve seen the smash and grab videos and how quickly they can turn violent.

Just in San Francisco, police records show close to 2,900 shopliftings were reported in 2022, way up from 2020, when shopliftings actually decreased by 34%, when the COVID pandemic began and many businesses shut down.

But the crime rebounded in 2021, with shoplifting reports going back up 15% from pre-pandemic levels.

“There’s no deterrent in the state of California to discourage theft at this point,” said Mike Leininger, a retired police officer and security consultant.

…except vote the people out who’ve allowed this state of affairs. Yet the same people complaining refuse to do that or has it not occurred to them?

Pick your poison, folks.

If you won’t do something, there’s nothing to be done.