NYC shoplifting soars with over 21K complaints lodged so far this year — causing CVS, Walgreens to close up shops

Metro

By Lauren Elkies Schram and Tina Moore

New York City is losing drugstores as retail theft continues to surge.

Gotham has logged 21,578 shoplifting complaints this year through May 12, up 5% from the 20,552 thefts during the same period last year.

Manhattan has seen 8,896 incidents of retail theft alone.

Crime is so rampant, national chains like Target, CVS and Walgreens are closing locations and tempering expansion plans.

Target announced at the end of last year the closure of nine stores across four states, including one in Harlem, due to theft.

“We cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests, and contributing to unsustainable business performance,” the company said.

While shopping patterns have changed, with people making more purchases online, theft is “a factor” in chains closing up shop, said one Manhattan retail broker.

“The old Love drugstores and Price Wise were 2,500-square-foot stores that seemed to succeed years ago,” said Big Apple retail broker Robin Abrams. “Then they mostly closed as they could not compete with the 10,000- to 20,000-square-foot Duane Reade, Walgreens, CVS and Rite Aid stores. Now we are ‘over- drugstored’ and . . . and these chains will operate less stores in smaller spaces.”

Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and an adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said part of the problem was that politicians shrugged off retail theft instead of targeting it.

“Our politicians have told us, ‘Shoplifting is not a problem,’” Giacalone said. “And then all of a sudden, we start seeing all these issues that are happening because many of these crimes have been downgraded by the politicians themselves . . . Eventually you gotta pay the piper.”

Retail theft, which the NYPD only recently added to its crime-tracking CompStat reports, has nearly doubled in the city in the last six years. The number of incidents in Gotham steadily climbed from 32,254 complaints in 2017 to 37,922 incidents in 2019, before falling during the height of COVID-19 in 2020. From 2021 to 2023 citywide complaints increased again from 43,892 to 59,137, the data indicate.

The climate has made it tough for big drugstores already in the midst of downsizing.

Walgreens is on track to reduce its national footprint by roughly 200 stores in fiscal 2024, CEO Timothy Wentworth said in a call with analysts about the company’s first-quarter earnings. CVS announced plans in 2021 to shrink its national retail footprint by 900 stores: 300 each in 2022, 2023 and 2024.

In the Big Apple, locations are shuttering, with drug store companies forgoing some leases upon their expiration and putting other spaces up for sublease.

In Manhattan, five former CVS outposts are on the market, according to broker Joanne Podell, who is handling the leasing of the spaces. Walgreens has 17 former stores on the market in Manhattan, per a list from real estate firms JLL and SRS.

And Rite Aid is shuttering 53 additional stores in nine states as part of the company’s bankruptcy proceedings. That is on top of an initial list of 154 store closures.

“When you have a local drugstore, a local business, close down, you’re also losing jobs, you are inconveniencing the residents, and it has a long term impact on the quality of life of the community,” Mayor Eric Adams said.

Three weeks before her local CVS closed for good at 2495 Broadway at West 93rd Street in February, Maria Kucer, 61, said she saw a guy “scooping stuff” from the shelves into his black duffel bag. Kucer was told the same man had hit the store two days earlier. And that wasn’t the first time Kucer witnessed stealing at the store.

“I felt they were stealing from me,” Kucer said of the thieves. “Inevitably I ended up paying more for items as a result of the thefts and since the cashiers, pharmacists and staff felt like family to me, the thieves made me mad.”