As looting continues and lockdowns return, many retail companies have announced recently that they are shuttering some locations that have become simply too expensive to maintain.

Major cities have been hit by a wave of "smash-and-grab" robberies, where organized groups of looters attack store employees and escape with thousands of dollars in merchandise. Organized retail theft now costs retailers across the country a grand total of about $65 billion per year.

Meanwhile, some areas announced this month that they are again implementing stricter COVID restrictions, including mask and vaccine mandates, over concerns about rising virus cases and the new Omicron variant. Early data has pointed to the Omicron variant being less lethal but more contagious than the Delta variant.

Some of the country's major pharmacy chains have said that they plan to close a number of stores.

In November, CVS announced that it will close around 900 retail locations over the next three years, which amounts to about 9% of its 10,000 stores. CVS locations across the country have been affected by looting over the past year and a half, but the company cited more customers shopping online in its decision to close stores.

Rite Aid said just this week that it is closing 63 stores in order to reduce costs and boost profitability.

In October, Walgreens announced that they would close five locations in San Francisco, citing rampant shoplifting across the city. The company said that it increased security measures at Walgreens locations "across the city to 46 times our chain average" in an effort to combat San Francisco's "organized retail theft" epidemic.