'1619 Project' author Nikole Hannah-Jones blasts anti-theft retail measures

'1619 Project' author Nikole Hannah-Jones spoke out on Twitter last week over the 'demeaning' experience of anti-theft measures inside stores. 

Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, said she believes if stores are going to lock up the items, they need to at least be better prepared to handle the customer volume. 

'If you're going to lock up everything in the drug store, an already demeaning shopping experience, at least have enough workers to open up the cases for all the customers who just need a razor,' Hannah-Jones tweeted. 

Stores like Walmart and Walgreens began locking up merchandise over the past several years as part of anti-theft measures set among a rise in shoplifting rates. 

'It can't be a financial winner. I spend a lot less because I'm not waiting every time I need to grab something from a different aisle or even a different shelf in the same aisle. You can't read labels, etc. I've literally walked away. It's just a terrible shopping experience,' she continued. 

'1619 Project' author Nikole Hannah-Jones spoke out on Twitter last week over the 'demeaning' experience of anti-theft measures inside stores

This is the tweet sent by Nikole Hannah-Jones that sparked backlash online 

Stores like Walmart and Walgreens began locking up merchandise over the past several years as part of anti-theft measures set among a rise in shoplifting rates

This is the '1619 Project' the book written by Nikole Hannah-Jones 

Many on the social media app agreed with the author, some even stating that they have had to call store employees for things like toothpaste. 

Others, however, pointed to a rise in retail thefts that has left some stores concerned.

Just last week, reports indicated that New York City saw record levels for retail theft for the year in a row in 2022.

There were more than 63,000 shoplifting complaints in 2022. That marks a 45 percent jump from 2021's 45,000 and a shocking 275 percent jump from the mid-2000s. 

Hardest hit retailers in the Big Apple are stores like Target and Duane Reed.   

Hannah-Jones acknowledged those worries, however. 

The author and reporter cited a January article from CNBC addressing the shoplifting concerns. 

'Over the last two years, Walgreens has been raising the alarm about increased theft. As a result, it hired private security guards and locked up merchandise so it can't be accessed without a store associate,' Gabrielle Fonrouge reported. 

'[Chief financial officer James] Kehoe said the company has spent a 'fair amount' to crack down on the thefts but acknowledged the private security companies they've hired have been "largely ineffective." These guards can do very little but call law enforcement or hold a suspect until police arrive,' the article reads. 

Hannah-Jones said she believes the decision to lock up merchandise 'can't be a financial winner' because it prompts her so spend less overall 

'If you're going to lock up everything in the drug store, an already demeaning shopping experience, at least have enough workers to open up the cases for all the customers who just need a razor,' Hannah-Jones tweeted 

Products are displayed in locked security cabinets at a Walgreens store

'It can't be a financial winner. I spend a lot less because I'm not waiting every time I need to grab something from a different aisle or even a different shelf in the same aisle. You can't read labels, etc. I've literally walked away. It's just a terrible shopping experience,' she continued 

Hannah-Jones also responded to another person by sharing a similar article, this one from the New York Times, citing that Kehoe said he may have 'cried too much' over 'organized shoplifting.' 

Many in the comments agreed with Hannah-Jones over the measures while others slammed her for the tweets. Others offered their own suggestions for how they can solve both the shoplifting and the locked cases.

'Or armed security guards who shoot looters,' replied one Twitter user. 

The '1619 Project' creator has been critiqued in the past for her takes on crimes, both big and small. 

In 2020, the New York Times reporter sparked outrage for saying she saw the destruction caused by some protesters during the George Floyd marches as 'not violence.'

'I think we need to be very careful with our language,' Hannah-Jones said at the time. 'Yes, it is disturbing to see property being destroyed, it's disturbing to see people taking property from stores, but these are things,' she said.   

'And violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. And to put those things- to use the same language to describe those two things I think really- it's not moral to do that,' she said at the time. 

In 2020, the New York Times reporter sparked outrage for saying she saw the destruction caused by some protesters during the George Floyd marches as 'not violence' 

Just last week, Hannah-Jones, speaking at an MSNBC event called a 'National Day of Racial Healing,' spoke about the backlash she received for what some have called 'revisionist history' in her '1619 Project.'

Hannah-Jones founded the project with the New York Times in 2019, using essays, photos, podcasts and eventually a book and guide for educators arguing that America was founded the year a group of slaves arrived in the country and not when independence was granted in 1776. 

The writer has said she believes to her project and the subsequent book of the same name was caused because Americans are 'all taught this history so poorly,' referencing education on the plight of African and Asian Americans. 

'1619 Project' will continue to spread in media circles with the debut of a six-part documentary that will stream on Hulu later this year, produced by Oprah Winfrey.

'It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative,' the NYT Magazine wrote on its website.

The project won a Pulitzer Prize that year.

Published in August 2019, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in the English colony of Virginia, the work has been criticized by some academics for its claims - and angered many others who saw it as unpatriotic.

In December, Hannah-Jones told the Associated Press that the ongoing debate was unsurprising.

'We've been taught the history of a country that does not exist,' she said.

'We've been taught the history of a country that renders us incapable of understanding how we get an insurrection in the greatest democracy on January 6.'

She said that America was 'willfully' avoiding its complicated and painful past, and that was why her work was so polemical.

'Steps forward, steps towards racial progress, are always met with an intensive backlash,' she said.

'We are a society that willfully does not want to deal with the anti-blackness that is at the core of so many of our institutions and really our society itself.'

Her work has sparked intense discussion about teaching of history in schools.