Ayanna Pressley Claims Walgreens Is Racist For Leaving Roxbury

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) recently accused Walgreens of being racist for moving one of its stores out of crime-ridden Roxbury near Boston, Massachusetts.

Pressley accused Walgreens of “racial & economic discrimination.” The Massachusetts congresswoman claimed that the company’s decision to close its pharmacies in Roxbury was “not arbitrary or innocent.”

“They are disruptive, life-threatening acts of racial & economic discrimination. As a multi-billion-dollar corporation, they must stop divesting from Black & brown communities,” Pressley wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

While speaking before Congress, Pressley pointed out that the community of Roxbury is “85% Black and Latino.”

“This closure is part of a larger trend of abandoning low-income communities like the previous closures in Mattapan and Hyde Park — both in the Massachusetts 7th,” she added. “When a Walgreens leaves a neighborhood, they disrupt the entire community and they take with them baby formula, diapers, asthma inhalers, life-saving medications, and, of course, jobs.”

The Walgreens store in Roxbury is the fourth to be closed in less than a year. The pharmacy chain said it would automatically transfer patient files and prescriptions to another one of its stores about a mile away.

Instead of mentioning the record levels of crime in Roxbury, Pressley included race in her remarks.

CrimeGrade.org, which compiles data from police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and later computes an area’s relative safety, gave an F score to the neighborhood or Roxbury. The outlet reported that a crime occurs in the area nearly every four hours.

“Your chance of being a victim of theft in Roxbury may be as high as 1 in 29 in the northwest neighborhoods,” the report said.

Walgreens, devastated by retail theft in past months, has indicated it would close about 200 stores across the U.S. in 2024.

In July 2023, footage showed a Walgreens store in San Francisco chaining freezers to prevent shoplifters in the crime-rampant city from stealing pizza and ice cream.

The pharmacy chain “says there are several factors taken into account when closing a store — including dynamics of the local market and changing in buying habits of patients and customers,” according to WFXT.