Walmart to build a police station inside Atlanta store

The Walmart on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Atlanta, which reopens next May after an arsonist set fire to the big box store, will introduce a new feature to fight back against a growing wave of crime.

For the first time, it will include a police precinct to reduce the risk of theft and violence at a store deemed critical to the Vine City’s low-income neighborhood, according to Atlanta city officials.

Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens told the community when he recently introduced the new concept: “You’re thinking about going into this Walmart to shoplift or rob or whatever, and when you see the APD sign, You’re like, ‘Ah, not today’.” .

“People said they wanted to see more police,” Dickens later told a reporter. local newspaper.

life without walmart

The few months without Walmart have been tough for the community. “It’s like you’re in no man’s land without Walmart,” says Ellie Love Metro Broadcasting Corporation Channel 11 last week.

When it opened in 2012, residents who previously had to travel long distances, sometimes even on foot, to their local Krogers finally had a supermarket of their own to buy groceries like fresh fruit and vegetables — a major public health concern in the area poorer areas.

The fire in December, believed to have been started for the purpose of diverting theft, has raised concerns that the largest U.S. retailer will permanently close the store.

Instead, it is downsizing and becoming a neighborhood market, focusing on everyday essentials like food and medicine, rather than a traditional super center, in an effort to prevent Fuji City from becoming a “food desertAs feared.

Theft (or shrinkage as it is sometimes called in the industry) is perhaps the second biggest problem facing retailers today, after the health of the American consumer.

Social media has been flooded with videos of thieves brazenly looting store property in broad daylight, further fueling the “anything goes“.

U.S. retailers face a $100 billion problem

Corporate decisions can even indirectly exacerbate this sense of lawlessness. Not far from Vine City, workers at a Lululemon restaurant in Peachtree Corners outside Atlanta were summarily fired in June after confronting masked robbers. “They’re trained to step back and let the theft happen,” CEO Calvin McDonald told CNBC, adding, “It’s just commodity.”

According to the National Retail Federation, theft is a Nearly $100 Billion Question In the U.S. To make matters worse, eight in 10 retailers surveyed said violence and assaults related to organized retail crime were on the rise compared with the previous year.

Late last month, Dick’s Sporting Goods largely blamed increase in theft.

The crime epidemic has put additional pressure on traditional high street retailers, which are already struggling with the cost of maintaining brick-and-mortar stores, compared with streamlined e-commerce rivals such as Amazon that sell goods online.

California has been hit especially hard. Nordstrom was recently forced to close its doors in San Francisco, a city whose income inequality gap has led to enormous wealth and stifling poverty.

Many blame it on a November 2014 California law change known as Proposition 47, which aimed to reduce prison overcrowding by raising the threshold for felony theft. The move has been accused of inadvertently fueling a shoplifting tsunami so overwhelming that law enforcement or the justice system couldn’t handle it.

California is probably the most famous example, but in total at least 40 US states have raised dollar thresholds since 2000, partly to account for inflation.The U.S. Chamber of Commerce argued last year that criminals are exploiting this Repeated theft while avoiding prosecution.

“If this situation is not corrected over time, prices will be higher and/or stores will close,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon told CNBC. December last year.

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