Walgreens Is Expensive, Not Racist

Representative Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.), a member of the far-left Squad, is upset with the pharmacy chain Walgreens because the company is closing up shop in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood. The representative accused the chain of racism, saying, “These closures are not arbitrary, and they are not innocent. They are life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination.” The Representative is correct — these closings aren’t arbitrary. Walgreens won’t say it, but the Warren Street location has been plagued by theft and violence for years. As an extreme example, six women assaulted a security guard while robbing the store in 2021; the Roxbury neighborhood has a violent crime rate 214 percent higher than the national average.

Despite what Pressley and Senator Ed Markey think, Walgreens doesn’t owe the public anything. The company almost certainly took losses on the location for a time, and with many businesses facing strong headwinds in a market where loan rates are costly again, they’ve begun trimming the stores that lose. The grousing about what Walgreens “owes the community” is bizarre — the group offered Roxbury a service no one else was willing to offer. While it’s understandably frustrating for those who simply filled their prescriptions and bought eight-dollar chips from Walgreens, their complaints should be directed at the criminals who made operating in Roxbury unattractive enough to abandon the location. To Markey’s claim that Walgreens “must provide resources to limit the harm they’ve created,” one would think Walgreens was passing around fentanyl to minors rather than offering medicine and sundries for little to no profit and a lot of headache.

Markey and Pressley communicate how little they think of their constituents’ intelligence when they spout economically illiterate claptrap. Unfortunately, it appears to work, and it’s much easier and more comfortable for left-wing politicians to rail against “the corporations” than it is to institute meaningful law enforcement. All the while, Walgreens and CVS will be pushed from neighborhoods by organized theft rings and the public will pay the price imposed by those who should be in jail.