‘Walgreens Isn’t A Welfare Agency’: Jesse Watters Mocks ‘Squad’ Member Who Called Store Closure Racist
Harold Hutchison on February 1, 2024
Fox News host Jesse Watters roasted Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts Thursday for claiming the closure of a Walgreens in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston was due to racism.
Walgreens closed the store, citing changes in consumer buying habits and the market, according to NBC Boston. Watters called out Pressley after she blasted the drug store chain in a Tuesday speech on the House floor, saying she needed to address the reason the store was closing.
“When a Walgreens leaves a neighborhood, they disrupt the entire community, and they take with them baby formula, diapers, asthma inhalers, lifesaving medications, and, of course, jobs,” Pressley, a member of “the Squad,” a group of left-wing Democratic members of the House of Representatives, said in her speech. “These closures are not arbitrary, and they are not innocent. They are life-threatening acts of racial and economic discrimination.”
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Watters tore into Pressley after he aired part of her speech. “Pressley needs to look at the root cause here: Shoplifting, same story everywhere. Walgreens is scared to say shoplifting is why they are closing,” Watters said. “Walgreens isn’t a welfare agency that can just hand out free toiletries, they are a business. They don’t owe you anything.”
“They have employees and customers they need to worry about,” Watters continued. “It’s a business decision. If you want to keep stores open in the neighborhood, keep crime out.”
Walgreens shut down five stores in San Francisco due to shoplifting in October 2021. Walmart closed four Chicago area stores in April 2023, citing crime as a factor, while Target announced in September that it was closing stores in New York City, Seattle, San Francisco and Portland due to safety concerns.
A CVS store in Washington, D.C., that became notorious for being hit with organized shoplifting, will be closed by the national chain on Feb. 29 due to the repeated incidents of theft. Many of the organized thefts took place on days when shipments of products arrived, leading to empty shelves at the store.
The National Retail Federation and the Loss Prevention Research Council reported that stores lost over $119 billion to retail theft in 2022.
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