It's just after 2pm on Saturday
I'm at the CVS store on 11th Street in Tracy.
The person in front of me in line is a woman receiving social security.
She worked hard throughout her life.
I made a conscious effort to follow the rules.
Her life is becoming difficult because of inflation.
As she was shopping, she noticed a young man literally running out the door with items without paying.
Stunned, she asked the cashier – who had just looked up at the young man and then returned to ring the shopping bell – if he had just seen it.
The cashier answered without hesitation, “Yes,” and added, “That's always the case.”
Another question, a two-part answer.
Shoppers say management has told employees to leave the miscreants alone. There are concerns about the safety of office staff and their compensation in the event of injury or worse.
She added, “The police won't react anyway because it's not over $950.”
Explain the unintended consequences of the City of Sacramento's pursuit of “social justice” by decriminalizing all thefts under $950.
Yes, petty theft for all practical purposes is no longer a crime. Even so, that's the ticket, and a pat on the wrist rather than the proverbial one.
And guess who will end up paying more to cover the cost of covering the torts of everyone who follows the rules, including the few who rely 100 percent on Social Security checks. please.
Turn your calendar back six days and go 152 miles just southeast of Tracy.
That means Lemoore in Kings County.
It is a city with a population of 24,500. Lemoore Naval Base is located here. And agriculture is king there.
Milk ranks at the top of the list with employers such as Leprino Foods, the world's largest producer of mozzarella cheese.
Close behind the dairy industry are pistachios, almonds, tomatoes, beef cattle, and the old king, cotton.
Lemoore once had Foster's Freeze.
It was closed on Monday.
That was the same day the city of Sacramento officially gave special treatment to fast food workers.
The minimum wage for many fast food workers has been raised from the standard $16 an hour to $20 an hour.
Based on the most recent publicly available information, there are or were 65 Fosters Freeze locations in California.
This means franchise owners are subject to the state's $20 minimum wage requirement for all fast-food restaurants with 60 or more locations in the state.
Owner Lauren Wright opted to cut her losses.
According to a survey, many people have stopped eating out due to the effects of inflation.
So raising prices is risky at best, especially for smaller players swimming in a pool with big companies with dozens of franchises under the same name.
Larger McDonald's owners around the world, such as the company that owns more than 20 McDonald's restaurants in the northern San Joaquin Valley, are in a position to somewhat delay, or at least gradually increase, the inevitable price hikes.
That little guy isn't.
As a result, the pressure causes the herd to be culled.
Monica Navarro, former assistant general manager at Lemoore Foster's Freeze, said most of her co-workers would have liked to be paid the $16 an hour they were making.
They believe it is better than being unemployed.
Navarro noted that other fast food employees in Lemoore have had their working hours significantly reduced. And with these staffing shifts, their workloads have increased.
Another unexpected outcome occurred in Sacramento's pursuit of social justice.
The $20 minimum wage has put some small businesses out of business, while many of the remaining fast-food workers are forced to work fewer hours and take on more work.
Take a trip to San Francisco, light years away from Lemoore.
Back in February, Frederiksen Hardware and Paint Co. in the Cow Hollow Marina area did something that didn't get much coverage outside of local media.
Owners are trying to survive a rising trend in grab-and-dash thefts that defenders of California's marshmallow theft law say are exaggerated.
This is not a target. This is not Walmart. Not a CVS store.
It's a little mom-and-pop hardware thrown into the lions.
Customers are greeted by employees as soon as they enter the store, to avoid putting businesses out of business due to grab-and-dash theft and jeopardizing employee safety.
That employee then follows them around the store to help them. They never leave your side until you check out.
Chalk up another unintended consequence of Sacramento's short-sighted pursuit of social justice.
If you think that's a bad thing, stay in San Francisco for a second and let local governments fix the problem that is an unintended consequence of the people in the California Legislature who converted a budget surplus of $97.5 billion into a projected budget in October 2022. Let's see what happens when we try to help. The current deficit is $73 billion.
The San Francisco County Board of Supervisors wants to allow residents to sue if a grocery store that closes fails to find a replacement owner or cooperate in forming a food cooperative within six months. ing.
If you've ever been to San Francisco, you know that grocery stores as defined by Tracy and Lemoore (think Safeway, Winco, Save Mart, etc.) are rare.
They are almost all incidents between my mother and friends.
To be sure, the proposed law provides a number of exceptions.
But at the end of the day, in a city where you might trip over a crack in the sidewalk, more than a dozen class-action lawyers and social justice lawyers rush in to claim that any small business in a city that holds out its cards is open for business. It turns out. A few seconds of faceplanting on concrete.
So why don't grocery stores want to operate in San Francisco, other than what myopic social justice lawmakers dismiss as lame excuses for rampant shoplifting, snatching and dashing?
Take the case of Whole Foods, which had the courage to open a store on San Francisco's Market Street in 2022, only to close after just over a year.
The store made 538 emergency calls to 9-1-1 over a 13-month or 395-day period. On average, that's almost 1.3 calls per day.
These were not shoplifting calls.
There were incidents of vagrants (another name for homeless people who are not polite) throwing food, fighting, behaving in a threatening manner, and constantly shouting.
It also includes one or two calls about a San Francisco-specific incident: people attempting to defecate on store floors.
No one is saying California should emulate Hong Kong or even North Korea.
And no reasonable person can argue that we need to adjust our criminal justice system and our economy.
That said, there is growing evidence that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction.
There was a time when the people we entrusted to run our government believed that two wrongs do not make a right.
Now, the guiding maxim is that the end is the end, regardless of how callous, unfair, or harmful the means may be to those who are law-abiding and seek to support themselves by legal means. Rather than justifying the means.
