The ice cream was my breaking point.
When I want it, I’m usually having a bad day. The locks made it worse.
Unbreakable. Comically large. Glittering. Silvery. Affixed to the top right-hand corner of the glass door. I could see the primo shit I was willing to shell out $10 for: the vanilla Häagen-Dazs. I had two options. Smash the glass with my forehead, or smash the big button to call over an underpaid, overworked employee at this understaffed Safeway. I chose “button. ” As I waited, I meditated on ice cream and grocery stores. What they’ve come to.
Breaking point is the wrong phrase. Breaking points are supposed to be an endpoint. But what choice do I have, Safeway? QFC? Trader Joe’s is fine—and the canned dolmas make for a banger lunch in a pinch—but I can’t subsist on snacks and quirky TV dinners. I need meat. Veggies. Ingredients. I don’t have the space or wherewithal for a victory garden to overcome this tyranny. I am on a desert island with these companies, and they’ve drawn a dividing line in the sand. Their side has all the coconut trees. Their trees, their jungle rules.
Each one of the following has been a non-breaking breaking point for me: hiring guards to check my receipt as I leave, physically chasing my girlfriend out of the store when she didn’t show them hers, the ban on backpacks, private security following crying homeless people around, private security hiring that skinny white nationalist with extremist tattoos flashing the taser on hip like it was his big, wet, post-coital cock, and, also, the goofy miniature grocery store they’ve set up in the middle of the grocery store that cordons off the booze and toiletries from the rest of the store. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Everyone I know hates it.
It’s a Black Mirror episode in there. I can’t stand seeing people line up, flash their receipt to a guard armed with a taser while being filmed on who knows how many cameras, who then go about their merry way like this is always how grocery stores have been, how grocery stores should be, and how grocery stores will remain in perpetuity. It’s a borderline abuse of shopkeeper’s privilege and—if there’s a lawsuit in this—I hope someone sues the Häagen-Dazs out of them.
We’re told to tolerate this because the market demands it. These private companies claim—often without evidence—that we’re in the middle of an organized retail crime spree the likes of which this country has never seen before. News reports would indicate that they are probably lying about that, but in this market-driven society, they’re allowed to lie without consequence. They’re not accountable for anything, and they’re not responsible for making food more affordable, when the expense drives crimes of poverty. You people watched Les Mis, right? We can all generally agree that Inspector Javert is a dick. Why are we doing this?
Theoretically, the consumer can strike back. Our weapon is our dollars, but let’s survey the battlefield. Fuck. They own it. We can’t boycott food, or practically swap a short walk with heavy groceries for a long walk with heavy groceries, and Amazon delivery just cedes power to bald evil. They’re bending me, and you, and your mother, and your grandmother over the barrel of economic inelasticity and spanking us barehanded.
The supermarket is supposed to be the capitalist Garden of Eden. The one thing that makes all the bullshit worth it. More food than one could ever hope to eat. More brands than anyone would even want to try, with more brands on the way, all promising something new and better and tastier.
I grew up partly in Florida, which is 90 miles from Cuba. My dad told me—horrifyingly, forebodingly—that Cuba didn’t have grocery stores like ours. There were no brands, no choice. I picked the cans of whole peeled tomatoes for our weekly spaghetti dinner. Forget familiar Hunts. The sexy Contadina lady. Hearty Red Gold. The alluring Cento. In Cuba, tomatoes were just “tomatoes.” I shivered. I shared his horror. In America, the government did not control my tomatoes.
I still buy whole peeled canned tomatoes, and I’m willing to shell out $6 for the primo shit. And I have to be willing to subject myself to a Safeway’s Fisher-Price police state to get them. Some choice.
If this is the Safeway at 75th and Banner Way, I too had to wait to get ice cream. This Safeway, it should be noted, held off as long as possible before their recent security steps. I have seen blatant theft as the cashier could only stand aghast.
When the overworked worker came over to unlock the ice cream door, she said homeless had been coming in and directly eating the ice cream right there!
Despite the narrative that Viv is propagandizing, the crime spree is TOTALLY REAL. Ask the workers themselves, and they will give you first hand accounts. They’re not exactly the MAGA types you know and they’re not NIMBYs either.
Grocery stores have the thinnest profit margins of any large volume business at around 1%.
All that security cost is less than the cost of the thefts they had without it, or they wouldn’t be incurring the cost. That should tell naive Vivian all she needs to know.
SAME, Vivian.
SAME.
And for all the dum-dums (you know who you are, I’m looking right at you) who say biggie theft is the reason all groceries are now lite prisons (the locked public restrooms are insulting), they are wrong in their thinking. Theft is up because stores stopped properly staffing them. They don’t have nearly enough clerks, cashiers, etc. So yeah…the children run wild.
So now we all endure lock down the rest of our lives, while stores continue to work on automating as much as possible to reduce for human employees. As for the homeless stealing all their stuff, seems obvious to me. Give them the nearly expired foodstuffs out the back door, instead of throwing it away. But that would require a modicum of humanity, which corporations do not have.
So the theory here is that grocery stores added expense to their bottom line in the form of security devices / security staff (that are probably far more expensive than regular staff) and made things more inconvenient for their customers ultimately leading to lower sales because no reason at all? Sure Jan. So weird they don’t do the same things state wide since apparently they just want to be pricks.
I look forward to Katie showing us how much better things can be with her city run stores.
@4: “I look forward to Katie showing us how much better things can be with her city run stores.”
I imagine Katie looks forward to Zohran figuring it out for her.
Everybody with a functioning brain knows this is the result of the city going soft on retail theft. Before the extra security measures, I would see tweakers go into the Ballard Fred Meyer, grab stuff off the shelf, and just walk out, not even bothering to hide what they were doing because they knew there would be no consequences. The staff would just look at them dumbfounded. There was so much theft at the 7-11 at Leary and 11th (just 1/2 block from the encampment at the Leary triangle) that they just shut it down for good. Thanks to the city’s enabling of this dysfunctional behavior we are now stuck with one way gates, locked up goods, and receipt checkers. We won’t go back to the way it was until the societal norm of not stealing is once again enforced.
@3: “So the theory here is that grocery stores added expense to their bottom line in the form of security devices / security staff (that are probably far more expensive than regular staff) and made things more inconvenient for their customers ultimately leading to lower sales because no reason at all?”
@6: “Everybody with a functioning brain knows this is the result of the city going soft on retail theft.”
The rock-solid denial alone should amaze: “…private security following crying homeless people around […] making food more affordable, when the expense drives crimes of poverty.”
With the exceptions of actual elected (and, of course, “progressive”) office-holders, the Stranger has done more than anyone else in Seattle to cause — and to exacerbate — the situation it now decries. It has relentlessly pushed Big Lies: that the homeless just need shelter, that their poverty is the result of anything other than untreated addiction and mental illness, that allowing human beings to rot in filthy encampments represents “compassion,” that Seattle’s progressive homeless policies have been other than total — and totally obvious — failures. And when their Royal Selves become the slightest bit inconvenienced by the predictable results of these chronic failures, the Stranger’s writers simply ignore these failures, and lash out at their favorite hate-objects*. Even after a decade of human beings dying on Seattle’s streets, The Stranger consciously chooses to remain firmly part of the problem, rather than even talk about realizable solutions.
Yes, people complain about affordability, then complain when the stores choose to pass along theft costs to the paying customers rather than shut down (which is where all Seattle pharmacies went when prices couldn’t be raised enough to cover the thef, even with private paid security).
Then customers complain about the stores implementing measures to cut down on theft in order to not raise prices.
The whole situation is as absurd as the reasoning of this article.
The shoplifting that happens is so blatant that even Hellen Keller could see it. I mean you have to be off in some other world to not notice it. I see people walking out with unpaid merchandise all the time. What the stores need to do is have more loss prevention. so they can actually bust the shoplifters rather than the guards who are more of a deterrent than anything else. The Stranger loves to gloss over crimes that are committed against large corporations. But the fact is that shoplifting is a crime and lets be honest no one has to shoplift to eat in Seattle we have The Open Meal Service, Foods banks and more.
@3: “Theft is up because stores stopped properly staffing them.”
What kind of sick reasoning is that? Theft is okay if nobody’s watching?
“But that would require a modicum of humanity, which corporations do not have.”
Humanity is a two-way street. Thugs and thieves should start showing it for a change and stop their evil ways.
No matter where you are in the city, Safeway is not your only option. Don’t like their environment, don’t shop there (I think Safeway is a nightmare thus I choose to shop elsewhere). I also don’t shop with Amazon or Walmart for a plethora of reasons – it’s really not that difficult (plus there’s the side benefit of supporting local businesses that typically have been in the community longer than most of these writers have been alive).
So shop that local mom and pop, join that co-op, support that minority own institution, borrow your parents Costco card – you can do it, I believe in you Viv.
JEEEBUZZZ….What a fucking princess!
@3
I’ll never understand the progressive obsession with blaming everyone and everything but the criminals for crime.
There were times when my wife and I went without so our kids would eat. We never resorted to theft.
Should be fun to watch Seattle’s continued death spiral.
What am I saying?
Your new mayor will fix everything.
A grocery store locking up ice cream or other food stuffs IS terrible. But the only time I’ve ever seen that is in Safeway on 15th NW in Crown Hill (where I also stopped for Haagen-Dazs and found it locked, and I’ll never go back there). In my NW part of the city, Town and Country Market, Met Market, PCC, Ken’s Market, Marketime, even the Fred Meyer on 85th–none of them lock up food. Most have security but it’s not hard to see why.
It’s odd to read people questioning the security presence. We think that PCC or our hometown chains like Town & Country spend the money on that when they don’t need it just to… why exactly?
I’m on Christmas vacation in Longview and Kelso,WA and they don’t lock up anything except the top shelf liquor at both Safeway’s…
For years Stranger writers have been making knee-jerk Les Mis references any time someone dares speak the word “theft” aloud. Now the chickens have come home to roost and those same progressive champions sit openly weeping in front of a locked ice cream cooler, still failing to make the connection between shouting “lol shoplifting’s not a real crime” from the rooftops and “omg they locked up my sugary treats but whyyyyy?”
I don’t spend much time in grocery stores so I guess it’s just bad luck that I’ve repeatedly watched shoplifters walking out with cases of beer, baskets piled high with food and even carts filled with items. The cost isn’t just monetary, it’s a huge stress on staff. Some workers have been threatened and assaulted by thieves, even when obeying store rules on not intervening with theft. I’m pretty sure Ms. McCall knows that locking up ice cream doesn’t make a very robust police state. Just more click bait.
I mostly go to the Red Apple on Beacon Hill (or Le Pomme Rouge, as we call it). It’s kind of expensive, but they don’t lock anything up except liquor. It’s well known among the Shoplifter community that if you get caught you’re going to get the tar beat out of you. They got in trouble for it a few years back, but I don’t think they changed their ways. I’ve seen them chase people out into the parking lot and tackle them.
Be sure to check out The Stranger next week when Vivian McCall addresses the topic “Why I Is Dumb.”
I recommend Vivian consider becoming homeless so that she can just go into stores and take what she wants. It’s pretty much what she’s advocating for. The Stranger really is becoming a pro-dirt-bag rag more so than I can remember in its history.
I know it sounds silly, but I blame The Stranger for most of Seattle’s problems. Founded by 20-somethings in the early 90’s, instead of growing up with their audience (which would make the original audience in their 60’s), they have tried to keep their audience hip and relevant and progressive all these years, to the detriment of the community. People grow up, The Stranger has not. Because of them and their years of anti-police and anti-authority rhetoric, while they may have not actually been successful in defunding the police, they’ve certainly done a good job removing any respect for the position, resulting in a shortage of good police officers. Adding their voices and hundreds of opinion pieces and news articles pushing the homeless agenda, instead of having good solutions involving addiction and drug treatment centers, we have millions of dollars spent on such spurious ideas as “Housing First” and articles such as these, blaming grocery stores (rather than the thieves) for locking up ice cream. The Stranger could have grown up, became a kindly and wise King Maker, used their bully pulpit for good, instead of evil, but chose instead to stay the immature wise-cracking saboteur, further pushing our city into the progressive hell-hole we find ourselves in today.
This article is completely false. I have personally witnessed the organized theft. My good friend (a POC) quit his job at Safeway because of constant threats from thieves who would arrogantly and threatening take one or two full carts out the door without paying. Complaints to management and to UFCW 3000 did nothing. I am hopeful the Stranger can get its fact straight before making our provisioners out to be evil. You want safe open environments you either need accountability for those who engage in antisocial conduct or a locked-down security presence. It is our choice. So far we have refused to hold antisocial behavior accountable thus we get the only other option. Very bad reporting designed to create an us v them dialog when answers benefiting all of us is the higher road to good reporting. Personal accountability for antisocial conduct must return to our communities
Safeway is part of the Albertsons group.
They aren’t losing money from theft. lmao.
Albertsons gross profit for the twelve months ending August 31, 2025 was $22.240B, a 0.17% increase year-over-year.
Albertsons annual gross profit for 2025 was $22.256B, a 0.95% increase from 2024.
Albertsons annual gross profit for 2024 was $22.046B, a 1.33% increase from 2023.
Albertsons annual gross profit for 2023 was $21.756B, a 4.99% increase from 2022
Was at a southside Safeway a recent evening and was lured by the siren song of digital coupon ice cream which was behind one of the aforementioned locks. So I pushed the button. And waited. I pushed the button again. And waited.
A couple minutes passed and finally, I gave up, and walked away, only to pass the exact same ice cream sitting in an unlocked endcap freezer. I should have just eaten it right there to make a fucking point about how absurd this all is.
Funny that neither the Stranger-istas (responsible for all western society evils when K Sawant isn’t) or the ur conservatives (tweakers, in every aisle!) mention the organization that exists to control theft.
Isn’t there an incredibly well paid force of police in Seattle that is, in theory at least, supposed to perform some of the tasks the trailer park rent a cops have taken?
If they don’t respond, then why pay them such exorbitant salaries?
I’ve seen people walk out of the UVillage QFC with carts full of groceries.
I’ve helped prevent people from walking out the front door of that same QFC with stuff they didn’t pay for – they started to try to take someone’s cart from them immediately after, and then a group of people stood up to them.
The TLDR is this; your protestations against evil corporations lying about “retail crime sprees* are BS of the highest stinkiest gaslighting order to those of us who’ve regularly seen this with our own eyes.
Your article isn’t journalism. It’s socialist fan fiction with zero grounding in reality. You should be ashamed.
3 – you seem to expect checkout clerks to tackle shoplifters? And it’s just because there’s empty open lanes at the checkout that they can steal things?
That’s a crazy pants take, completely unmoored from reality.
23 – yes albertsons make a profit. What is their profit margin?
I realize that the concept of margin might be a difficult one when you see large numbers and lose all ability to create rational thoughts but grocery stores typically run on razor-thin margins of about 1.6%. Which means it doesn’t take much to make them unprofitable or put them out for business.
I know you think that large numbers mean that they’re like Scrooge MacDuck swimming in a pool full of money but might I recommend gaining more than a 5th grader’s understanding of how business works and join the grown up world instead of being ignorant?