Sometimes our plans simply don\u2019t go the way we want or expect them to go.\u00a0 Occasionally we are simply victims of bad luck but, more often than we care to admit, the fault lies not in our luck but in ourselves in that we failed to think things through before we began.\u00a0 And, sadly, on many of these occasions our own failures result from willful blindness rather than innocent ignorance. \u00a0Case in point: Walgreens and the City of San Francisco.<\/p>\n
To give a short summary, Walgreens has shuttered a number of pharmacies within the city of San Francisco in the past several years due to widespread theft (Shoplifting Has Forced Walgreens To Close 17 Stores<\/em><\/a>;<\/em> Walgreens Closes 17 Stores In San Francisco Because Of Rampant Theft<\/em><\/a>).\u00a0 Jason Cunningham, regional vice president for pharmacy and retail operations in California and Hawaii, is quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle<\/a> saying that<\/p>\n Cunningham offered the following statistic to support his claim about shoplifting:<\/p>\n This story might be a mere footnote in the business columns were it not for the fact that it is almost a textbook example of how willful blindness (or worse) results in what economists call unintended consequences.\u00a0 In a nutshell, both the City of San Francisco and Walgreens hold viewpoints and enacted policies that, to the untrained eye, seem to be compassionate, but which ended up harming the same vulnerable people which these parties claimed they want to help.<\/p>\n Of course, the idea of unintended consequences is not a new one in economics circles.\u00a0 EconLib has a nice summary of this topic<\/a>, in which they point out that the idea first appeared in Adam Smith\u2019s The Wealth of Nations.\u00a0 Smith\u2019s Invisible Hand describes the positive unintended consequences whereby each individual, following his own self-interest, helps to build a healthy, thriving society.\u00a0 In modern times, the phrase \u2018unintended consequences\u2019 usually carries a negative connotation and has come to mean all the bad things that result from some policy enacted by either blind, but well-meaning, politicians or by sinister opportunists who sell the willfully blind a bill of goods.\u00a0 But, regardless of whether the consequences are good or bad, all of us are obligated to make sure that they are at least intended; a point-of-view most forcefully expounded by Frederic Bastiat.<\/p>\n What is new is just how clueless the residents of the City by the Bay are in making good, or rather bad, on their compassion.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the muddle-headed thinking of the city government.\u00a0 In April 2018, the San Francisco legislature, in all its wisdom, deemed shoplifting goods valued at less than $950 a misdemeanor, thereby removing a strong disincentive to theft.\u00a0 Some in city government view shoplifting as a petty crime not worth enforcing but as anyone familiar with the concept of the broken window syndrome knows, smaller crimes beget bigger ones and a failure to enforce laws invites lawlessness.\u00a0 In addition, the more recent, widespread antipathy towards the police has emboldened the criminal element across the country.\u00a0 No doubt, other members of the government likely believe that they are showing understanding and compassion towards the marginalized (a la Cynthia Nixon\u2019s recent comments) or they are shamelessly virtue signaling because they live in areas unlikely to be impacted by their decisions.\u00a0 But, as will be demonstrated below, all that this point-of-view does is harm the most vulnerable.\u00a0 Regardless of the interplay between all these motives, the result is a theft rate in Walgreens four times higher than stores in the rest of the country.<\/p>\n Walgreens is not entirely blameless in this as well.\u00a0 No doubt due to both political reasons and matters of liability, the pharmacy chain has taken a non-confrontational approach to shoplifting in its stores.\u00a0 According to anonymous reports from employees on reddit, Walgreens instructs its staff to do nothing to stop a shoplifting incident but to simply report it after the perpetrator has left the building. Once the cops arrive there is really very little that they can do, even if the courts would have been zealously prosecuted the offenders.<\/p>\n