The announcement put Walgreens at the center of one of the city’s most acrimonious debates. What amounted to the closure of a small handful of chain drugstores in the city drew national media attention, fueled by an increasingly bitter fight over how San Francisco polices and prosecutes crime.

“We’ve been sounding the alarm for a while that this issue is not getting better,” said Rachel Michelin, president and CEO of the California Retailers Association, which represents the point of view of merchants.

But the timing of Walgreens’ decision led observers to wonder whether a $140 billion company was using an unsubstantiated narrative of unchecked shoplifting to obscure other possible factors in its decision.

“They are saying (shoplifting is) the primary reason, but I also think when a place is not generating revenue, and when they’re saturated — S.F. has a lot of Walgreens locations all over the city — so I do think that there are other factors that come into play,” Mayor London Breed told reporters last week.

A Walgreens spokesperson declined Friday to answer specific questions about the store closings and whether other factors — such as competition from online retailers, stagnating foot traffic because of the pandemic and originally opening too many stores in San Francisco — played into the decision.

A Chronicle analysis of city maps found 53 Walgreens in San Francisco, compared with 22 CVS stores. Those numbers include locations that are solely pharmacies, inside medical buildings or other retailers.

Spokesperson Phil Caruso said he was also unable to share figures about the stores’ revenue. He instead referred back to a previous statement from the company, saying that over the past few months, retail theft in San Francisco had escalated to “five times our chain average” at its stores and that as a result, the corporation had ramped up investments in security for San Francisco locations “to 46 times our chain average.”

Four years ago, Walgreens told shareholders it planned to close 600 stores nationwide. It wound up closing 769. In 2019, the Illinois company said in a U.S. Security and Exchange Commission filing that it would shutter 200 stores, or fewer than 3% of its 10,000 locations in the U.S. — one of several cost-saving measures projected to save $1.5 billion in annual expenses by 2022, according to the filings.

San Francisco Supervisor Dean Preston seemed exasperated and skeptical of Walgreens’ rationale. One of the five ill-fated stores, at 300 Gough St., sits in his district.

“Walgreens is abandoning the community. We do not know exactly why,” he said The Chronicle. Preston tweeted that his office is trying to get “further clarity” on the impetus for the closures, and assess “whether there is a path” to keep the Gough Street store open.

“Two things are true: Walgreens has experienced retail theft, and Walgreens has long planned to close stores. We do not know which factor or factors led to the decision to close 300 Gough and other San Francisco stores,” Preston said.

One Stanford economist observed that in San Francisco, the customer base is dwindling given the decline in population downtown after the pandemic and the number of people working remotely.

“Since working from home is here to stay, city center retail is going to see lower demand in the long run,” Stanford University economics Professor Nicholas Bloom wrote in an email, citing a study he published in May that shows 15% of residents left the city center during the pandemic and have not returned.

“So this is going to be one of many such store closures,” Bloom speculated.

“While Walgreens may have publicly blamed this on higher thefts, another factor is there are simply less people in the city center, spending less money,” he said.

Police records show that the fives stores slated to close experienced 319 shoplifting incidents since the beginning of 2018. The numbers appeared to swing wildly: The Walgreens at 4645 Mission St., which had the most shoplifting reports — 37 — in 2020, had the lowest number — 3 — as of Oct. 13 this year.

Shoplifting in San Francisco became a viral story after the wide circulation of a video in June showing a man grabbing items from shelves in a Walgreens at 300 Gough St. and stuffing them into garbage bags. The Gough Street store is among the stores set to close. He rode out of the store on a bicycle while two astonished onlookers — one wearing a security guard’s uniform — recorded the incident on their cell phones.

By announcing it was closing stores because of shoplifting, Walgreens inserted itself into one of the most divisive political battles in the city, one that contributed to a broader debate about crime and law enforcement. Proponents of the recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin, for example, point to shoplifting as one example of how life in the city has deteriorated on his watch.

In an opinion piece for the San Diego Union-Tribune, California Republican Party Chair Jessica Millan Patterson pointed to the five Walgreens closures as evidence that “Democratic policies have created a crime spike.”

Retailers have been unhappy since the state in 2014 passed Proposition 47, which classifies shoplifting as a misdemeanor unless the stolen items were valued at more than $950. They have unsuccessfully sought to have the law overturned. The California Retailers Association lobbied against the law’s passage. Criminal reform advocates argue that minor shoplifting arrests disproportionately affect underrepresented communities and contribute to unfairly high incarceration rates.

Michelin contended that shoplifting is a heavy burden for chain stores and other merchants. Hiring security guards and installing locked cases is expensive, she said. She expected to see other retailers shut down in the future.

Some city officials shared that concern, which is why they began a multipronged effort by adding more dedicated police investigators and upgrading the city’s online reporting system.

San Francisco does struggle with unusually high property crime rates compared with many other cities. According to a 2019 report by the Public Policy Institute of California, San Francisco had the highest rate of property crime per capita of any city in the state. That’s probably at least in part because of the city’s high levels of economic inequality and population density, criminal justice researcher Magnus Lofstrom previously told The Chronicle.

Lost somewhere in the conversation are customers, who have grown impatient with the locked shelves and other security measures, and the specter of fewer stores next month.

“It’s all very sad,” Haight resident Qussay Ammar said, standing outside the Gough Street Walgreens on Thursday afternoon. Workers had already packed up the merchandise in the cosmetics aisle, now lined with boxes and empty shelves. Most other products, from air freshener, to vitamins, to anti-bacterial wipes, were behind plexiglass.

Another shopper, Keira Wiele, said she’d witnessed “a lot of retail theft at this particular Walgreens,” but that she’s still wary of the company’s messaging.

“Do I think they’re in a position where people are grabbing a couple snacks from the shelves here or there? Yes,” Wiele said.

“Do I think it’s a huge issue? No.”

On Friday, customers at the Ocean Avenue Walgreens stopped to gape at a sign in the front window. It marked Nov. 8 as the last day of business.

San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Susie Neilson contributed to this report.

Rachel Swan, Danielle Echevarria and Shwanika Narayan are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com,
danielle.echeverria@sfchronicle.com, shwanika.narayan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan,
@DanielleEchev, @shwanika