Photo: Google Maps
It’s not corporate racism that’s closing the West Main Street Walgreens, it’s Democrat stupidity.
As the mayor cries about “disinvestment,” the neighborhood association complains of abandonment, and the online progressives denounce institutional racism, the Walgreens is going to close because it has been killed by the political party to which all these people swear allegiance.
You can only stab the goose that laid the golden egg so many times before it flops over dead.
In this case, word has come that as part of a national restructuring that will close 25% of its stores, Walgreens is apt to shutter its West Main Street location in Rochester, NY, in November. The store, near the now-gutted intersection that used to be known as Bull’s Head, serves the impoverished western half of the city in a neighborhood known for crime and decay. The closing will come on the heels of the closing of a similar store two miles away at Brooks and Thurston a couple of years ago.
The response has been angry entitlement, from the politicians and the people. They don’t want the store to close, and if it does, they say, it will be a crime against them, an injustice forced upon them by oppressors.
And that might be so.
But they’re confused about the oppressors.
It’s not the executives, it’s the politicians.
Specifically, the Democrat politicians.
Here’s why.
Walgreens is closing West Main Street because it is losing money there. And it is losing money there because of inflation, reimbursement rates, crime, labor costs and taxes.
Inflation has increased expenses for the company on every front. Medicaid prescription reimbursement rates are below the actual cost of providing the prescriptions, meaning the store loses money on every prescription it fills. Retail theft sees hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise walk out the door every year. Labor costs are the highest they’ve ever been. Taxes are staggering.
And the policies of the Democratic Party and its office holders are the root causes of all of those difficulties.
Inflation in the Biden Administration has been at 40-year highs, Medicaid reimbursement rates are set by New York state Democrats, New York state Democrats have refused to punish or prevent shoplifting, New York state Democrats have imposed the third-highest minimum wage in the country, and New York state Democrats have made New York the second-worst state in the nation for businesses from a tax standpoint.
And Kamala Harris promises to raise the national business tax by one-third if she is elected.
Elections have consequences, Nancy Pelosi said, and the consequence of electing Democrats is you kill businesses. That means the West Main Street Walgreens in Rochester, NY, is going to go away.
It’s not the corporate bosses who are the bad guys, it’s the political bosses.
And nobody seems quite smart enough or honest enough to recognize that. Instead of seeing the fingerprints of his own party and philosophy in the death of the West Main Street Walgreens, the Rochester mayor wraps himself and his constituents in victimhood. He claims this was done to him, instead of done by him.
But he’s wrong.
When you make business the enemy, when you denounce capitalism, when you besiege the private sector with ever more taxes and regulations, when you impose the death of a thousand cuts on the wellspring of your society’s prosperity, you end up in ruin.
And this is just the latest example of that.
And we need to be honest about why this is happening.
It’s because of the asinine and destructive policies of the Democratic Party. The Democrats have become not the party of Thomas Jefferson or Andrew Jackson, but of Karl Marx, and they are laying ruin to America just as has happened to every other country following the big-government socialist path.
They caused the inflation, they set the reimbursement rates, they excused the crime, they jacked up the labor costs, they levied the taxes, and the store died.
And stores will keep dying as long as the same wrong-headed policies are followed.
The people who work or shop at the West Main Street Walgreens are victims of oppression.
But it’s not oppression by corporate executives.
It’s oppression by Democrat politicians.