Bartell’s Store #1, which, for me, was a hop, skip, and a jump from Link’s Westlake Station, closed its doors for good on Thursday, December 14. I spent a few minutes in the drug store’s final hours. And, apparently, so did Seattle Time‘s business reporter Paul Roberts. What he saw, I saw. It was a dreary scene, and the cashiers clearly wanted the whole bad business to be over and done with. “How do you feel about all this?” I asked one cashier. “Don’t you read the newspapers?” they said. The answer baffled me cause almost all of the news stories about the present Bartell’s apocalypse almost never mention its impact on workers. When the closures were blamed on criminals nourished (suckled) by a progressive city council, however, there was great concern about the safety of workers. Indeed, stores were even closed for no other reason than to keep workers out of harm’s way. Now that the explanatory power of crime and socialists has been clearly overwhelmed by the seemingly endless store closures, what happens to workers is of little importance for Seattle’s right.

The workers also had no say in the sale that plunged Bartell Drugs into the black hole of Rite Aid, a corporation based near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. That catastrophe can be entirely blamed on Bartell Drugs’ former CEO, Kathi Lentzsch, and chairman, George D. Bartell. They sold a company that “generates more than $550 million in annual revenue” to the former drugstore giant for a measly $95 million in late 2020. โ€œItโ€™s likely the price would have been higher a few years ago… But we feel this is a pretty good price,โ€ Lentzsch told the Puget Sound Business Journal. But why was the sale such a bad idea to begin with? What went wrong? And how did Rite Aid become the black hole that’s presently sucking into its seemingly inescapable void a considerable part of a Seattle-born drug company? A company that, before 2020, had 61 stores (it’s down to 45, and downtown has, for the first time since 1890, no Bartell Drugs location).ย 

Because the main players in this unprecedented destruction of value are not talking to the press, one has to dig into the past to find the answer. This post will provide that answer. Expect to be equally amazed and appalled.

Ari Hoffman was not the first to mindlessly connect the demise of Bartell’s with the crime and homeless crisis. It began soon after Lentzsch became the company’s CEO in 2018. In 2019, she said the downtown Bartell’s stores were closing because “the cost of stolen items is too high.” She made this a key part of her leadership. The city had to do something about all of this crime, and, as always, it had to become more business-friendly.

In her long interview with Puget Sound Business Journal, which praised Lentzsch’s innovative modernization of the old family-owned company, she made this point, when asked, “What other issues need the business communityโ€™s attention?”

I hope that businesses can work together with the public sector to ensure our community, our employees and our customers are safe as they go about their day. Crime accompanied by violence has increased at retail to the point that doing a mundane task like shopping is taking a risk that may not be worth it to a customer. This challenge and the increasing costs of doing business in Seattle have negatively impacted retail businesses leading to store closures. If and when a retailer closes due to these issues, jobs are lost. This situation will improve only if we all come together to tackle the problem with honest and direct conversations, a sense of urgency and a real desire to find solutions.

Around the same time, Lentzsch said this to a KIRO 7 reporter: “[Crime is] a concern. I think weโ€™re sweeping it under the rug. The city council, the mayor, the state, the judicial system, the communityโ€”we all have to come together to figure this out.”

This was before the pandemic. Crime, crime, crime. But in 2020, her tune changed. It became, on the one hand, the city’s many and too-high taxes (“…[w]e, of course, have seen business taxes rise in, you know, various taxes rise in Seattle”); and, on the other hand, the lockdown. The company needed to find a buyer if it was going to survive the plague. This was for the benefit of the customers and, once again, the workers. The CEO was doing everything she could to keep the 130-year-old dream alive for the little people. At this point, the crime story was pretty much dropped. But the damage was done. Seattle Is Dying was hard on that crime like a dog biting a rock.ย ย 

Lentzschโ€”whose time with Bartell ended right after the sale (though she had hoped Rite Aid would give her a chance at the big time), and, according to her posts on LinkedIn, is now on the Board of Directors for Skagit Valley Maltingโ€”set into motion the destruction of a third of a mid-sized company that had 1,600 wage earners in the region. (“The average employee at Bartell Drugs makes $41,196 per year, which is competitive for its industry and location. Some of its highest paying competitors, Vudu, Rite Aid, and Navarro Discount Pharmacy, pay $67,887, $37,918, and $37,450, respectively.”)ย 

Utterly nothing good has come out of the decision made by her and the chairman of Bartells’ board. They sold the company for a song. And, by appearances, didn’t bother to look into Rite Aid’s situation, which was pretty bad even before 2020.

In 2017, the agreement to merge Walgreens with Rite Aid ended in a fiasco: The FTC permitted the sale only if it was “downsized… to the sale of 1,932 Rite Aid stores to Walgreens.” (Pay attention because we are now entering the event horizon of a black hole that recently turned off the lights at “Store #1.”) The deal that resulted cost Rite Aid more than 40% of its business and made it less competitive with CVS Health and Walgreens. This is the corporation that bought Bartell Drugs. “They were for sale. Soโ€ฆtheir bankers or whatever approached us,” said Rite Aid’s former CEO to KING 5. (Heyward Donigan stepped down from the top position a few months before the corporation filed for protection from its creditors.)ย 

โ€œLooking forward to the future with Rite Aid,โ€ George D. Bartell, chairman of Bartell Drugs, said in a press release regurgitated by the Trump-loving KOMO. โ€œ[W]e are excited about the opportunity to expand upon our mission to be the best neighborhood drug store in the Pacific Northwest. Rite Aidโ€™s vision fits well with what we think will best serve the needs of our customers. This is a day to celebrate the 130-year success story of Bartell Drugs, while eagerly anticipating the future.โ€

Rite Aid on Broadway closed earlier this month. CHARLES MUDEDE

But there was no basis in reality for George’s optimism. He was either ignorant about the root of Rite Aid’s decades-long woes or was lying through his teeth. We may never know. But the fall of Rite Aid began right around the time, 1996, it transformed the Thrifty PayLess on Broadway into a copy of itself, the Rite Aid whose locally famous marquee went dark earlier this month. To understand what happened, and why the corporation was forced to sell, in 2018 1,932 stores to Walgreens for “nearly $4.4 billion in cash,” we have to go into the black hole. (Sorry for stretching this galactic metaphor so much, but it makes sense when I show the sun in it.)

To see exactly where Bartell Drugs is today, one only has read an excellent 2015 article by The Patriot-News: “Rite Aid’s troubled history of family drama, high debt and mismanagement.” It’s all there. And it goes something like this: The company was started just over 60 years ago in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a town idealized by the present president of the United States, Joe Biden. Like all of the people in Biden’s fantasy, the founder of Ride Aid, Alex Grass, believed in hard work and was frugal. From these principles, he built a drug store empire that, in “the go-go 1990s” found Grass’s son, Martin Grass, as its leader. This is where the trouble begins.ย 

The Patriot-News:

The company was the nation’s No. 1 drugstore chain in store numbers and the No. 2 chain in sales when Alex handed off the reins to Martin… But that wasn’t nearly good enough for Martin Grass… Upon his takeover, Martin pursued a strategy of building bigger, more expensive free-standing stores while completing a series of corporate acquisitions to grow Rite Aid and push it into new regions of the country.

Martin Grass borrowed billions to pay for this vast expansion. And when, in the late 90s, the size of the corporation was not justified by its revenue, the son began cooking the books to keep its value on Wall Street high. When the father learned of the true state of Rite Aid, he tried to take the company back.ย 

ย The Patriot-News:

According to a January 2000 account in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Alex Grass went to New York on Sept. 7, 1999 to warn two members of the company’s board of directors that its debt was out of control and Rite Aid was “bleeding cash.” Alex Grass’s dire message, according to the newspaper account: “Rite Aid was heading for bankruptcy if it kept spending more money than it was taking in.” When Martin Grass learned what his father had done, he was so livid that he stripped the walls of Rite Aid’s headquarters of all his father’s memorabilia, the Inquirer writes.

This, as you can see, is the stuff of Succession. After Martin Grass’s book cooking was exposed, he was tried, convicted, and sent to a federal prison for an impressive seven years (the stuff of Arrested Development). The corporation did its best to remove all memory of a catastrophe that crashed the value of its stock from the region of $50 to mere pennies, and permanently saddled it with the mother of all debts. To make matters worse, Rite Aid could only borrow dear (expensive) money because its credit rating was, thanks to Martin Grass, in the toilet.ย 

ย The Patriot-News:

Within months, Rite Aid would [remove] all traces of Martin Grass, most notably dismantling that ostentatious helipad. Today, the Grass name doesn’t appear on the company’s website; there’s no mention of father or son.

When Rite Aid sold nearly half of its stores to Walgreens in 2018, it spent almost all of the cash servicing debts that, for the most part, can be traced all the way back to the ex-convict (he was released from prison a few months after his father died in 2009). The same goes for its declaration of bankruptcy in October. So when you see another Bartell go under, know it’s from a nothingness opened by the heydays of an ambitious and high-helicopter-flying Martin Grass. Bartell’s leaders either did not do their homework on this matter or just did not fucking care. You can guess which it is. But you should know by now crime and homeless people had nothing to do with all of these closures. When will they end?

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

43 replies on “Read This Post If You Want to Learn the Real Reason for the Bartell Apocalypse”

  1. Thanks Charles. This article started a bit slow, but wow, it picked up speed in the end.

    I figured the demise of Bartell’s was just your typical big-company-buys-and-guts-small-company story. You know the one. Buy the company with the good reputation. Immediately layoff “redundant” middle management. Start looking for cost savings in the various stores. Then close them eventually, when people realize that the company now sucks, and isn’t worth going to. Interesting to read that there is more to the story.

    If Kroger buys Albertsons, something similar will happen, although most people go to Albertons because it is cheap (instead of high quality, like Bartell’s). Mostly that will be a case of stores closing, and people being asked to pay more, since there will be little competition.

  2. Oh, and I think anyone with any sense knew the crime story was complete bullshit. Holy Shit, Walmart is one of the biggest companies on earth! You think they don’t have people trying to steal shit? Get real. Companies hire their own security — they even sometimes have their own little jail. Repeat offenders get banned from the store. This means that if they steal, they are trespassing, which is a bigger crime. You certainly wouldn’t close a large downtown store for that.

    But yeah, Bartell’s had it’s own financial problems, detailed quite well in the Seattle Times article.

  3. @1: how do you explain the 130-year run that proceeded this catastrophe, then? Do you not think crime was a problem at any point in that span? Do you really believe it was anything beyond an extremely minor factor here? And are you not fucking disgusted by the endless parade of incompetent, self-interest corporate cannibals who fail upwards over and over and over again?

  4. No mention of Amazon? How ironic (fitting?) is it that their gleaming corporate towers loom almost directly over Bartell’s #1. That store was fucking magnificent, filled with a random assortment of things I needed and didn’t even know I needed. But it seems that very few people want to step foot into brick and mortar retail anymore. Christmas shopping in downtown Seattle now is nearly impossible. And now Bezos is in Florida, his damage done.

  5. Wrong on several accounts. Bartell was going under. No one else wanted to buy them. It was Rite Aid or nothing. Bartell Drugs left to itโ€™s own devices would have gradually then suddenly gone bankrupt, as Hemingway would say.

  6. Bartellโ€™s started closing locations in downtown Seattle long before the merger with Rite-Aid:

    โ€œSEATTLE โ€” Local drugstore chain Bartell Drugs says itโ€™s closing a downtown location over crime concerns.

    โ€œIn March, surveillance video obtained by KIRO 7 showed a group of people who wandered in from the street, knocking items over and harassing employees inside the 3rd and Union location.โ€

    (https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/bartells-closing-downtown-seattle-location-over-crime-concerns/988486130/)

    Had it not been for the failed Seattle policies the Stranger loudly championed, Bartellโ€™s might not have declined to the point where a merger with Rite-Aid seemed like a good idea. Charles wrote this post to obfuscate the Strangerโ€™s culpability in Bartellโ€™s decline.

  7. You can’t deny that crime and shoplifting is a problem. You also can’t deny that Bartell’s was skating on thin ice. Of course a company is going to look for external sources to blame when they announce store closures, particularly if they are looking to be purchased.

    I’ve seen people walk out of the Bartell’s on Rainier carrying all sorts of things that they didn’t pay for, including one guy who threatened the guard with his vicious dog. OTOH, the parking lot is always full and the line for the pharmacy is always halfway down the store, so they must be making money. They finally figured out that they need to limit the entrance and exit.

  8. I visited the Bartell in Redmond before they announced it’s closure and there were absolutely no shoppers. None. How does a store stay open if there is nobody shopping?

  9. @12: I read your post, Charles. Wherein do you explicitly make clear Bartellโ€™s store closures started well before the sale to Rite-Aid? Your post implies otherwise:

    โ€œA company that, before 2020, had 61 stores (it’s down to 45, and downtown has, for the first time since 1890, no Bartell Drugs location).โ€

    And, as @11 noted, the crime problem downtown never actually went away. How would sale of Bartellโ€™s to Rite-Aid (or anyone else) change that?

    If youโ€™d clearly include relevant information in your posts, then we readers would not have to supply it for you. Please donโ€™t blame your readers for your poorly-written posts.

  10. @12 Charles, I’ve seen you do this somewhat frequently in the comments. Someone criticizes your work, and your response is a pouty “you just didn’t understand what I wrote.” Why bother commenting at all if you aren’t going to address the criticism head on?

  11. @11: I moved to Belltown in 2015, and left four years later. During that time, that was my local pharmacy, and I watched firsthand as it went from a wonderful experience to a dangerous place, right as the adjacent McGraw Park turned into an unsanctioned homeless encampment. (Charles will assure us this was a pure coincidence, that Iโ€™m a right-winger, etc.) The staff seemed to keep their spirits up for a long time, but it did visibly wear on them after awhile.

    It was a great place, a real asset to the neighborhood (I commuted via Westlake Station myself back then), and Iโ€™m sorry itโ€™s gone. Just another sad little example of what Seattle has allowed itself to become, by following the Strangerโ€™s failed policies.

  12. Why don’t some people here that mention the uptick in shoplifting also mention that perhaps Bartell’s leaned into that to support their crime-is-getting-crazy claim? They had an incentive to allow it to continue instead of taking real measures to reduce it.

  13. @18: First, it wasnโ€™t an โ€œuptick in shoplifting,โ€ it was brazenly obvious, large, and chronic. Second, as even Charles noted, the actual reason given by Bartellโ€™s for closing some downtown stores, and halting downtown expansion plans, was not merely shoplifting, but mostly the repeated assaults upon employees.

  14. @10: The only person denying one specific cause here is Charles: โ€œโ€ฆcrime and homeless people had nothing to do with all of these closures.โ€ The rest of us understand there were likely multiple causes for this outcome. The difference is Charlesโ€™ explanation has to satisfy two complementary ideological requirements: all of blame must go to the bosses, and none of the blame can go to the Strangerโ€™s advocacy of failed policies. Hence his obfuscation of when Bartellโ€™s started closing stores, and his whiny non-response when I called him on it.

    There was never any need for Seattle to tolerate unsanctioned encampments. The reasons it happened will someday fill at least one long academic book, but the approach from then-Mayor Murrayโ€™s declaration of crisis onwards should have been simple: either accept the help we offer, or move on from Seattle. How many amongst the campers would have paid, or fought, a citation for illegal camping? Few to none, and there would not now be such great suffering, misery โ€” and overdose deaths โ€” on Seattleโ€™s streets.

    Pretending a public-health crisis was a housing-affordability problem has killed a lot of people, continues to kill people, and has helped no one except a parasitic homeless-industrial complex. And the Stranger remains in denial about the whole thing, as Charlesโ€™ post demonstrates.

  15. @21

    “How many amongst the campers would have paid, or fought, a citation for illegal camping? Few to none, and there would not now be such great suffering, misery โ€” and overdose deaths โ€” on Seattleโ€™s streets.”

    tensorna’s genius plan:

    1. illegal camping citations

    2. almost everyone cited ignores it

    3. ??????

    4. no more suffering, misery, and overdose deaths on Seattle’s streets

  16. @22: You might want to look at the underlying evidence โ€” the graph of reported criminal incidents, per location, over time โ€” before you agree with the conclusions. Target had four locations in Seattle; it closed the stores with the second and third highest reported numbers of crimes over the year prior to closure. That hardly makes for a ringing endorsement of Charlesโ€™ โ€œcrime had nothing to do with itโ€ argument.

    Also, in the case of Bartellโ€™s closing downtown stores, it was one specific type of crime, assaults upon employees, which the company cited as the reason for closing those stores. The statistics you cited for Target do not contain the exact type of each crime at each location, so for all we know, the two stores Target closed had the highest numbers of assaults upon employees, and so your example completely agrees with Bartellโ€™s having cited crime as a reason for store closure.

    So, you cited a different company, in a different retail sector, in different locations, and yet the conclusion may well be the same as the one you sought to deny. Thanks for playing, and better luck next time.

  17. I know Slog commenters love a good bogeyman, but recent studies show that shoplifting has declined nationwide since 2019, much like the crime rate has also declined in recent years. Anecdotal evidence always sounds compelling, and maybe Bartell’s former CEO had specific local data to support their decision, but it doesn’t change the fact that mismanagement and corporate greed are the main reasons stores close.

    And as a postscript, Rite Aid recently had to settle with the FTC for using flawed facial recognition technology that falsely profiled shoplifters:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/business/rite-aid-ai-facial-recognition.html

  18. @27: No one here is saying stores closed for crime, crime, crime, and no reason but crime. Weโ€™re saying crime was one of several factors. Corporate mismanagement could definitely be another. (See @10.)

    Charles has taken the absolutist position, that crime could not have been a factor in closure of retail stores. Thatโ€™s both counter-intuitive and proving a negative, and he hasnโ€™t come close to providing evidence sufficient to support either attribute of his claim.

    (And, just as weโ€™re talking about Bartellโ€™s, not Target, weโ€™re talking about Seattle, not nationwide.)

  19. @28 Actually, every comment you made above blames the store closures on crime–shoplifting and assaults, specifically. And then you pivoted to blaming the homeless, which you insist is a public-health crisis (read: drugs) and has nothing to do with unaffordable housing, unemployment, mental illness, lack of social services, etc. So who’s the absolutist now?

    I acknowledge that crime exists in Seattle. I once even witnessed a shoplifter in the Wallingford Bartells, but that was 20 years ago, and somehow that store is still open last I checked. Petty theft, broken windows and homeless encampments are a bummer, but the “Seattle is dying” narrative you’re pushing is way overblown. You should be more upset that people are losing their jobs when corporations close stores and give their CEOs huge bonuses. If large corporations like Bartells and Rite Aid can’t figure out how to address an issue that has existed as long as retail stores have existed, that should raise eyebrows.

  20. @29: โ€œActually, every comment you made above blames the store closures on crime–shoplifting and assaults, specifically.โ€

    Read harder: โ€œThe rest of us understand there were likely multiple causes for this outcome.โ€ (@21)

    Also, I did not โ€œpivotโ€ to the homeless; they had already been mentioned, in Charlesโ€™ post, which absolutely and unequivocally states as fact that crime and homeless persons were not causes of the closures: โ€œBut you should know by now crime and homeless people had nothing to do with all of these closures.โ€

  21. @3: Yeah. But store security is expensive. And banning repeat offenders will attract claims of discrimination, profiling and complaints about facial recognition systems and privacy. Things that WalMart can afford but a smaller chain of stores with a sickly corporate parent cannot.

    The root cause of Bartell’s problems may have been it’s financial straights. But cutting back on employees on the floor to save money can end up creating security problems and endanger the remaining employees when the ones you let go were doing loss prevention.

  22. @3, @29, @32: While theft from retail establishments has always been a problem, Seattleโ€™s then-City Attorney, Pete Holmes, simply wasnโ€™t doing his job:

    โ€œBy declining, delaying and ultimately dismissing nearly two out of every three cases transmitted by the Seattle Police Department, the City Attorneyโ€™s Office is adversely impacting businesses, chronic victims, police officers and vulnerable defendants.โ€

    (https://downtownseattle.org/2019/10/system-failure-2-declines-delays-dismissals/)

  23. @33 Pete Holmes isn’t the City Attorney anymore. And if crime, which always has been factored into shrink by retailers, has not increased significantly if at all, then it would not be any part of the reason the store closed, unless you just want to list every expense as “part of the reason” which makes no sense.

  24. @34: โ€œPete Holmes isn’t the City Attorney anymore.โ€

    Which is why a careful reader might have noticed my use of the past tense. You know, to describe the time when Bartellโ€™s started closing downtown stores, the time before Bartellโ€™s merger with Rite-Aid? That time.

    โ€œโ€ฆcrime, which always has been factored into shrink by retailersโ€ฆโ€

    Part of retailersโ€™ anti-shrinking strategy has always been the police removing thieves from stores, and the justice system removing thieves from streets. Seattle simply stopped doing the latter, as the report clearly states. In particular, prolific repeat offenders were not removed:

    โ€˜Prolific offenders repeatedly victimize Seattleโ€™s busiest neighborhoods while cycling through the criminal justice system. โ€ฆ they very often committed the same crimes in the same neighborhood over a period of months or years. In some cases, a single individual had 40 or more criminal cases related to a single neighborhood, and often a small multi-block area, over the course of several years. In the most extreme cases, a single individual was responsible for near constant harassment of a business or public establishment over an extended period. Police reports for these incidents often note that the suspect is โ€œwell known to officersโ€ and sometimes directly ask for the justice system to provide relief for the community. Instead, the individuals sampled in this report cycled through the criminal justice system with little accountability and no apparent impact on their behavior.โ€™

    (https://downtownseattle.org/files/advocacy/system-failure-prolific-offender-report-feb-2019.pdf)

    โ€œโ€ฆhas not increased significantly if at all,โ€

    Your evidentiary basis for that speculative assumption being what, exactly?

  25. so the

    Crime WAVE!

    was Really the

    Succesionist’s Son

    but if we can bemoan

    the Lack of Fascism in America

    & just get more & better armed Po-po

    life as we know it’d

    be Rosy as fuck

    with all Profits

    going to the

    Tiptopy .01

    Percent-

    ers

    & everyone else

    Homeless and

    Hopeless and

    fighting over

    Cardboard.

    [omg

    when the

    ‘conscience’

    of tS’s a Sociopath

    you Know

    reich wing ascendency’s

    reached Peak Takeover for USofA.]

  26. More on the โ€œvulnerable defendantsโ€ mentioned @33:

    โ€œThe report acknowledges that jail may not ultimately be the appropriate place to resolve issues that are often the root causes of criminal activity, including mental illness, substance use and/or homelessness. Seattle is a national leader in offering alternative solutions to people struggling with behavioral health disorders that contribute to repeat criminal activity. However, absent a functioning criminal justice system, these programs cannot carry the burden.โ€

    (https://downtownseattle.org/2019/10/system-failure-2-declines-delays-dismissals/)

  27. @39: As noted back @9, Bartellโ€™s closed their profitable downtown location because of assaults against employees, not because of shoplifting. They had to give up a primary location downtown due to crime. That they later added another store, one which did not have such a good location, does not mean their profits did not suffer.

    @39: Your link reports only on nationwide trends in 2023; it does not mention Seattle. The topic is Bartellโ€™s store closures in Seattle, which started in 2019.

    @41: Your link is to nationwide trends in 2023. The story does not mention Seattle (in 2019 or otherwise), but does say that some cities bucked the nationwide trend. Seattle could be one of those cities, and if it is, then this story says the opposite of what you claim.

    Once again, the crime which began Bartellโ€™s trend of store closures in 2019 consisted of assaults upon employees, not shoplifting. Your apparent confusion of these two different types of crime does not change this.

  28. @43: My error; the second story does mention Seattle, as you quoted @41. But again, Bartellโ€™s closure trend started pre-pandemic, and thatโ€™s when shoplifting rates were higher. Thereโ€™s nothing in that story about assaults against employees, which is the reason Bartellโ€™s started closing stores back then.

    I really do not understand your deep need to deny that shoplifting, and assaults upon store employees, could be two of several factors in store closures.

  29. @43 do you have any stats regarding assaults on employees at that location in 2019 to support your theory? All the objective evidence indicates corporations are lying about crime driving closures, but you’re holding onto this one sliver of possible non-BS. Why?

  30. @44: Assaults upon employees were recorded by the storeโ€™s security cameras, and reported publicly by KOMO, just as I linked and quoted @9. (Anyone who doubts downtown had become really dangerous back then simply hadnโ€™t walked through it.)

    @34: โ€˜โ€ฆ unless you just want to list every expense as “part of the reason” which makes no sense.โ€™

    Um, thatโ€™s how accounting works. If the sum total of all expenses exceeds gross income for a quarter, the store lost money that quarter. Enough quarters of losing money and the store will likely be closed. That makes perfect sense.

    In the case of assaults upon employees, Bartellโ€™s hired extra security in response. That was an added expense, one which should not have existed, had Seattle kept downtown safe. This made the store less profitable, and therefore less likely to remain in operation.

    Again, I do not understand your obsession with denying how street crimes, including assaults upon employees, could be a factor in store closures.

  31. @45: And if we did theyโ€™d likely severely under-report the problem anyway. As the report I cited @37 noted, because of the City Attorneyโ€™s failure to do his job, by 2019 retailers downtown had effectively stopped reporting most incidents:

    โ€œAs a result, most organizations stated that they only reported extraordinary incidents to the police. On average, the organizations indicated that they reported to police fewer than one incident per day, and some reported fewer than one per week. Conservatively, that is less than 5 percent of the overall crime they respond to, and a fraction of the total crime that occurs.โ€

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