Here's a fun experiment: try buying deodorant at a San Francisco Walgreens in under ten minutes. Go ahead. We'll wait.

You can't, because it's locked behind plexiglass like it's a museum exhibit. So is the body wash. And the razors. And the toothpaste. And — at some locations — basically everything that isn't nailed to the floor.

This isn't a minor inconvenience. It's a visible, daily reminder that city leaders spent years downplaying retail theft, decriminalizing petty crime, and telling business owners to essentially deal with it. Now we're all dealing with it — one awkward buzzer press at a time.

As one SoMa resident put it: "I don't think there's anything in my local Walgreens that isn't locked up. The end result is that I no longer go to Walgreens and just order online." And that's the real story here. Every customer who gives up and opens Amazon instead is revenue walking out the door — revenue that funds local jobs, local tax receipts, and the viability of brick-and-mortar stores in neighborhoods that desperately need them.

Another local captured the absurdity perfectly: waiting ten minutes for an employee to unlock body wash at Target, only to have the $5 item escorted to the register like contraband. "If it was a $50 bottle of whiskey that would make sense, but use some common sense if you're going to lock the shit away."

The darkest take might be the most prescient. One San Franciscan mused about a future where a U.S. president visits a European supermarket and marvels: "So you guys just let people grab whatever they want and expect them to pay?" It's a joke. But barely.

Let's be clear about what happened here. Proposition 47 raised the felony theft threshold to $950. Progressive prosecutors deprioritized shoplifting cases. Repeat offenders faced minimal consequences. Retailers responded the only way they could — by turning their stores into low-security vaults. And regular customers, the ones who actually pay for things, got punished for everyone else's failures.

This is what happens when a city signals that property crime doesn't matter. The costs don't disappear — they just get redistributed. Higher prices. Worse shopping experiences. Store closures. And a growing sense that the social contract in San Francisco has a giant hole in it, roughly the size of a plexiglass display case.

The path back isn't complicated: enforce existing laws, prosecute repeat offenders, and stop treating theft as a victimless quirk of urban life. Until then, don't forget to press the buzzer twice.