I said as much here at the time; Walgreens wanted to close stores to cut costs (and perhaps to meet the costs of settling opioid sales litigation), and had said so in SEC filings earlier in the year.

But 'crime wave shuts down stores' was an easy story for many news outlets to run with during an election cycle. An interesting parallel data point was that Fox News coverage of crime dropped by more than half in the weeks following the election: https://www.thewrap.com/fox-news-violent-crime-coverage-elec...