A 26-year-old San Francisco man is in jail after being charged with 24 counts including second-degree commercial burglary and petty theft, in connection with 21 separate incidents at Walgreens and CVS stores.

The SF District Attorney's Office on Wednsday announced the arrest and arraignment of 26-year-old Miles Thomas. Thomas was arraigned Tuesday after being charged in connection with 21 retail theft incidents that occurred between May 2024 and March 6, 2025.

All of these alleged incidents occurred at three stores: the Walgreens at 1201 Taraval Street, the Walgreens at 1344 Stockton Street in Chinatown, and the CVS store at 701 Portola Avenue.

According to prosecutors, Thomas "almost exclusively stole dental hygiene products," and he allegedly stole over $1,000 worth of merchandise in each of two of the incidents.

In an August 28, 2024 incident at the Chinatown Walgreens, Thomas is "alleged to have stolen multiple items and pushed an employee out of the way who was trying to stop him." He later returned to the same store and allegedly pushed another employee who attempted to recover merchandise from him.

Employees described Thomas as always wearing distinctive sunglasses, and typically carrying a skateboard.

"Prolific thieves wreak havoc on our retail businesses and our communities," said SF District Attorney Brooke Jenkins in a statement. "My office will continue to do everything we can to put a stop to these brazen acts by taking action to ensure that there is accountability, and thieves understand that they will face consequences."

Prosecutors successfully argued that Thomas should be held in custody pending trial, and a judge ruled, with prejudice, that no bail would be set.

A preliminary hearing in the case is set for March 21.

Photo via Google Street View

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist

Two years ago, San Francisco had 21 CVS stores, but as of January, we will be down to 12, with the Haight Street location now set to close.

CVS announced Wednesday that its location at 499 Haight Street (at Fillmore) will close on January 11. The store joins locations at 601 Mission Street and 1690 Folsom Street in closing within the last few months, following seven other closures since 2021.

This will leave the Lower Haight without a pharmacy, though customers will be able to go about five blocks to the Walgreens at 2145 Market Street.

A rep for the company, Amy Thibault, put out a statement calling the closure a "difficult decision."

"Maintaining access to pharmacy services in the communities we serve is an important factor we consider when making store closure decisions," the statement says. "Other factors include local market dynamics, population shifts, a community’s store density, and ensuring there are other geographic access points to meet the needs of the community."

The Lower Haight CVS has long been a target of petty theft, though that may not be the deciding factor in this store closure. About a year ago, the store reconfigured much of its stock, putting the majority of products behind locked plastic doors — and requiring help from security to shop in almost any aisle. Even the refrigerated beverage cases are under lock and key.

Meanwhile, CVS announced its intention in 2021 to close 900 stores nationwide, shrinking its overall footprint by 9%, and closing stores at a rate of 300 per year over three years.

CVS only entered the San Francisco market, which had previously been dominated by Walgreens and Rite Aid, about a decade and a half ago, rapidly opening a number of locations around the city. This story from 2013 described how LandMark Retail Group was rapidly expanding its CVS presence in California, with 13 stores open in the previous year and three opening in SF within 12 months.

CVS stores, like other pharmacies, have been the targets of organized retail thieves around the Bay Area. Fences like this guy, and these guys, deal in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise, and some of it, of course, ends up getting resold on the sidewalk outside the 24th and Mission BART station.

Walmart has also reportedly agreed to be on the hook for a $3 billion settlement, but the Walgreens settlement does not stop the case that SF City Attorney David Chiu is bringing against that pharmacy chain.

The national retail pharmacy chain and much-discussed SF shoplifting victim Walgreens seems to be taking two different tacks in the crime and drug use discourse. On one hand, the Examiner reported Friday that Walgreens is pressuring SF DA Brooke Jenkins to crack down on organized retail theft. But it’s a different story in courthouses all over the country, as CNN reports that Walgreens and CVS have offered to settle their opioid overprescription lawsuits for $10 billion after being sued by countless states and counties who claim those companies helped create the opioid crisis.

CNN details the proposed settlement. “CVS said if the settlement is reached, it would pay the states nearly $5 billion over 10 years beginning in 2023,” according to that network. “Walgreens said [it] would also pay about $5 billion in remediation payments over the course of 15 years.”

But deep in the New York Times coverage of the opioid settlement, we see one key detail that is very relevant to San Francisco. The Times notes that “Walgreens’ announcement does not, for example, resolve the second phase of a trial underway in San Francisco federal court to determine the amount the company must pay to the city and county to abate the cost of the ongoing opioid epidemic.”

That refers to SF City Attorney David Chiu’s opioid lawsuit against Walgreens for creating a “public menace” by overprescribing opioids, which Chiu alleges created the fentanyl crisis. Chiu’s suit details that Walgreens prescribed more than 100 million opioid pills in San Francisco alone. His litigation has already rung up opioid manufacturers Allergan and Teva Pharmaceuticals for a $54 billion settlement, and the Walgreens component of Chiu’s case is still in the courts.

It’s important to note this was just an announcement from Walgreens and CVS, not a formal settlement, essentially just a very public negotiation and offer of what they’re willing to pay. (Though the Times notes that a number of the litigation attorneys put out a statement urging their client cities and states to take the deal.) And as you see in Walgreens statement below, they’re taking the old “no admission of guilt” route that makes them seem like innocent bystanders in flooding the nation with oxy pills.

“We believe this is in the best interest of the company and our stakeholders at this time, and allows our pharmacists, dedicated healthcare professionals who live and work in the communities they serve, to continue playing a critical role in providing education and resources to help combat opioid misuse and abuse,” the Walgreens statement says.

In addition to the $5 billion apiece from Walgreen and CVS, Bloomberg is reporting that  Walmart has tentatively offered to pay a $3 billion settlement. That is less relevant to SF, because there are no Walmarts in the City and County of San Francisco, though that big-box retailer has lo9cations in Alameda and Santa Clara counties.

Related: SF Suing Walgreens for Creating an Opioid ‘Public Menace,’ and This Sure Changes the Whole Walgreens Discourse [SFist]

Image: Kevin Y. via Yelp

The bicycle-and-trash-bag scofflaw who gained viral fame in a Twitter video last year robbing a San Francisco Walgreens was arrested again last week over two incidents at the Haight Street CVS, and you can probably take a wild guess what he’s accused of doing again.

It was June 14, 2021 when KGO reporter Lyanne Melendez hit a journalistic ”right place at the right time” jackpot. She captured a stunning video of a shoplifter brazenly riding into a Walgreens on a bicycle and flat-out emptying the shelves and tossing gobs of stolen merchandise into a trash bag. The tweet below made international headlines, in no small part because of a call-out of then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin, and the accompanying hashtag #NoConsequences.

But funny, when the exact same guy commits the exact same crime 13 months later, this time under a newly installed district attorney, the exact same reporter does not put the DA on blast nor complain of hashtag-no-consequences.

It seems a fairly routine crime case as the Chronicle reports that SFPD arrested a suspect for two separate robberies at the CVS at Haight and Fillmore Streets this weekend. But what jumps out here is the sentence “Jean Carlos Lugo-Romero, 41, was taken into custody at about 11 a.m. Saturday at a store located at Haight and Fillmore streets after attempting to leave the scene on a bicycle with a large plastic bag.”

Jean Carlos Lugo-Romero? Yep, that’s the fellow from the infamous Walgreens video, who had apparently robbed eight different Walgreens and CVS stores in a one-month span before ultimately getting arrested, and who pleaded guilty to doing so in April. According to KGO, he was arrested Saturday for two separate shoplifting incidents at the Haight and Fillmore Streets CVS, which parenthetically, is the exact same CVS where he was finally arrested on June 19 of last year.

According to an SFPD press release, Lugo-Romero visited his old haunt last Thursday, and proceeded to repeat the act that made him internet-famous. “Officers arrived on scene and spoke with the store employee who stated that the suspect entered the store with his own plastic trash bag and took dozens of items of over-the-counter medications, clothing, and cosmetics totaling in value of approximately $1,500,” SFPD says. “The suspect fled the scene on a bicycle on Fillmore Street. Officers searched the area for the suspect to no avail.”

Come Saturday morning, he allegedly pulls the same schtick. “On July 16, 2022, at approximately 11:00 a.m. SFPD officers from Northern Station responded to the same retail store located at Haight and Fillmore Streets regarding a burglary suspect that entered the store,” the release continues. “The officer was alerted by a store employee that the male suspect just exited and was on the corner of Haight and Fillmore Streets. The officer observed the suspect mount a bicycle with a large plastic trash bag and began to ride away. The officer approached the suspect with his vehicle and ordered the suspect to stop, to which he complied. As the officer proceeded to place the suspect under arrest, the suspect resisted the officer’s attempt to place him into handcuffs.”

According to KRON4, Lugo-Romero has been booked on charges of burglary, violation of protection order, trespassing, resisting arrest, possession of burglary [tool], possession of drug paraphernalia, and a probation violation. And CVS employees citywide will probably be pleased to see that as of this morning, Lugo-Romero is still locked up in County Jail 2.

But this does lead to an obvious question… how is this man out of state prison when he was sentenced to 16 months, not even four months ago? Well, he was actually released immediately, because as the Chronicle reported at the time, when he was sentenced in April, “Lugo Romero was released after he was credited the time he had already served behind bars.”  

So will he just walk right out again? We’ll see, but new DA Brooke Jenkins has more book to throw at him at her disposal. Lugo-Romero’s previous sentence had probation, and orders to stay away from that CVS. He is now alleged to have violated both, so that’s more charges there, and there may be more to come.

“The SFPD Burglary Unit has over a dozen open investigations in similar thefts, at the same retail store, where the primary suspect is Lugo-Romero. The estimated loss of stolen items exceeds $15,000 dollars,” SFPD says in their release. “It is anticipated several additional charges will be placed on Lugo-Romero in the coming days.”

Related: Brazen Walgreens Thief Charged With Hitting Eight Stores In One Month [SFist]

Image: @LyanneMelendez via Twitter

Photo: Alex Irimia

Amid a nationwide run on at-home COVID tests and a shortage stemming from the tests' producers scaling back production a few months ago, CVS pharmacies are putting a limit on the number of test boxes customers can purchase at a time, online or in person.

The popular and previously widely available BinaxNOW tests by Abbott Laboratories are in short supply at many stores, prompting CVS to limit how many of the over-the-counter tests can be purchased at once. As Bloomberg reports, the company will limit customers to six boxes purchased online or four boxes when purchased in person — and the tests, which retail for about $24, come two per box.

The restart of in-person classes at schools around the country, coupled with the ongoing surge of Delta variant cases, has created a surge in demand for these rapid tests — though they remain less accurate than the molecular-based PCR tests that are done at most city-run testing sites.

CVS said in an email to customers that the per-customer limits on the tests would begin this week, "in order to serve our customers’ OTC testing needs, and due to high demand."

Abbott Laboratories may have made some business decisions in error this spring as demand for rapid tests plummeted in the U.S., following widespread vaccination efforts and a drop in COVID cases overall. That all changed this summer, and the New York Times reported that Abbott appeared to be caught by surprise — having already shut down one of two factories producing the at-home tests and allegedly ordering some supplies destroyed as well, before the surge in demand began. They also laid off 300 workers at their remaining production facility in Maine in July, only to have to scale back up very quickly — the company denies destroying any usable test components, and says because it retained much of its supplies, it was able to scale back up quickly.

"Just as we have done throughout the pandemic, Abbott is deploying our resources and expertise from all over the company to help quickly meet rising demand," Abbott said in a statement.

Another company producing slightly pricier at-home tests, Australia-based Ellume, also is trying to scale up, and Bloomberg reports it is trying to open a production facility in the U.S.

Ellume says its tests are in stock at CVS, Walmart, Target, and Everlywell.

Photo by Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

Vaccination Nation is finally getting into full swing with both large-scale, mass-vaccination sites like Levi's Stadium and Moscone Center now open, and with CVS stores now taking appointments across the region beginning Friday.

About 81,900 vaccine doses out of a federal allotment of 250,000 doses are coming to California via CVS locations. And what was initially announced as a rollout of vaccines at CVS stores in just three Bay Area cities has already expanded to include locations in 18 cities where appointments begin on Friday, February 12. The full list of cities — which is expected to grow in the coming weeks — is below.

All of these CVS stores will still only be inoculating people in the Phase 1a eligibility tier, which is primarily healthcare workers, elder-care workers, and seniors over 65. But as eligibility expands in the coming weeks, so will residents' ability to score a vaccine at their local CVS, potentially, and depending on supply. Go to CVS.com to schedule an appointment.

• Alameda
• Berkeley
• Concord
• Daly City
• Fremont
• Lafayette
• Mountain View
• Oakland
• Palo Alto
• Pleasanton
• Redwood City
• Rohnert Park
• San Anselmo
• San Francisco
• San Jose
• Santa Clara
• Sonoma
• Vallejo

A quick search by SFist came up with available slots for Monday at 1900 19th Avenue in San Francisco, but locations in Oakland, Berkeley, Lafayette, and Sonoma were already booked up. It's not clear how many CVS locations have vaccine stocks in San Francisco or Oakland.

New appointments will open up every day, the CVS website says, and those interested in getting vaccinated should check back every day. (It's not clear if it's after midnight, or what time of the morning new appointments will come available each day.)

CVS had originally announced that vaccinations would begin today, February 11, but earlier this week the company announced it would be pushing back to Friday in order to ensure adequate supplies.

The federal program underpinning the rollout at chain pharmacies also includes a contract with Walgreens, but the two companies have initially divided up the states where they have both have stores where they're making vaccines available. As USA Today reports, CVS is covering California for now, along with 10 other states, while Walgreens will also be giving vaccines at select stores in 17 states, but not California for now.

Up until this week, vaccines had only been available through city and county health departments, and through healthcare networks and hospitals.

San Franciscans may have a better shot at getting vaccinated by making an appointment at one of the city-run vaccine sites at Moscone Center or City College, though supplies have still limited the number of appointments available each day. This webpage has links for all the vaccine appointment options in SF.

As of Wednesday, 106,111 San Franciscans have received their first vaccine doses — that represents 14% of the population over the age of 16, up from 11% earlier this week.

Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Oh, what a difference five years makes.

It was five years ago this month that San Francisco's first Target store opened to much pomp and celebration in the faux-Vegas splendor of the Metreon. Since then, four more have opened across the 7x7 — another one downtown on Bush Street, that one at Geary and Masonic, one on Ocean Avenue, and one that opened in July at the old Stonestown Borders/Sports Authority (designation determined by length of time in area). And now comes news that a sixth Target will be opening in the city, raising the question: Have we reached full Target saturation yet?

Like the Stonestown one, this Target is slotted for another former Sports Authority, a retail chain that closed all its locations after it went bankrupt then failed to find a buyer last year. The company's 1690 Folsom Street location, which based on Yelp reviews closed in June of 2016, has been sitting vacant ever since — a dicey proposition for a structure on Division Street, a location known for its persistent encampments of homeless people.

The perceived grittiness of the area didn't deter Target, it appears, even as the company's initial plans in 2014 to open four SF stores expanded with the Stonestown effort. As as reported by Hoodline in February, the retail giant first approached San Francisco's Planning Commission in February stating a desire for a sixth SF spot, asking "to lease the property, complete interior tenant improvements and limited exterior modifications such as new signage to convert it to a Target store."

SocketSite reports this week that unlike the other Targets in the city, which are the smaller "City Target" style stores with a limited selection of goods, the sixth one — right across from Rainbow Grocery, I'll note — will be a "full service" store, like the ones at Daly City's Serramonte Mall and (the far inferior one in) Colma.

Via the comments to their report, SocketSite also notes that the location's parking lot will boast 52 slots, but Target says that as it is "located in an area that is well-served by public transit...many of its customers may walk, bike, or utilize public transportation to access the site."

The 40,000 space will also include a "a full-service CVS Pharmacy and Starbucks," SocketSite reports. No word yet on if "Tally" the shelf-scanning robot will be allowed to transfer to SoMa from his(?) current position at their downtown location.

Related: Robot Roaming Aisles Of Downtown Target Confirms Underwhelming Future

An armed man robbed a pharmacy on a quiet Outer Richmond street Monday, escaping with an unspecified amount of medication.

Police say that the robber, a man in his 40s, entered a drugstore on the 300 block of 32nd Avenue at 11:01 Monday morning.

There's only one pharmacy on that block: A CVS at 377 32nd Avenue, at the corner of Clement Street. Per policy, however, the San Francisco Police Department could not confirm the name of the business at which the crime occurred.

The suspect, who was armed with a handgun, proceeded to the drugstore's pharmacy and "demanded medication," police say. A worker at the pharmacy complied, handing over an undisclosed type and amount of drugs.

The suspect then fled on foot, and remains at large. According to the SFPD, no arrests have been made in this case.

In an announcement that is sure to send longtime Castro neighborhood residents into fits of rage, a 10,000-square-foot CVS store occupying some prime retail space on Market Street at Noe has announced it will shut its doors in March after opening in mid-2014. Hoodline brings the news, noting as many others surely will that this space, along with its upstairs, could have been a much-needed Trader Joe's had nearby NIMBYs not killed that plan back in 2011, worried about too much traffic.

Somewhat bizarrely given the neighborhood's formula retail ban, the CVS location at the Market-Noe Center at 2280 Market passed muster with Planning and the neighborhood back in 2013, despite the fact that it is a mere two blocks from two well established Walgreens locations — a locational issue that likely spelled doom for the store, which was virtually empty at all hours of every day.

The vacancy in the shopping center comes just as multiple vacancies have opened up all along this stretch of Market Street, likely as landlords are hoping to cash in on rising retail rents citywide and longtime tenants aren't having it. An anonymous source tells Hoodline that CVS signed a 15-year lease on the space, and it was renting for $50,000 a month.

A CVS spokesperson tells the site they "will be marketing the store location to find a sub-tenant," so hopefully this vacancy will not last too long.

Related: Cafe Flore's New Owners Hope To Turn It Into A Cannabis Cafe (Eventually)

A man with a gun is trapped inside a CVS drugstore at 51st & Broadway as cops wait outside. The suspect was discovered inside the store before it opened, meaning that no employees were hurt. As of now authorities are telling people to avoid the area. Police have set up a perimeter around the area.

No word if the gunman shot anyone. We'll update as soon as we know more.

Update: Media reports that '[i]t's not clear whether the man had a gun. The employees said they hadn't seen one." Officer Johnna Watson explains, "It's not typical for anyone to walk into a store, a place of business, wearing a ski mask, so we have to assume the worst...We have to assume that this individual was there maybe to do some type of criminal activity, and so we're going to treat it with the utmost caution."

Update II: "Possible gunman" escapes! After the SWAT team walked into the CVS store, they couldn't find the suspect. Huh.

Little ol' San Francisco made ink in USA Today as part of Mayor Gavin Newsom's clever plan to rule to the state of California.

What pressing issue is he tackling this time? Tobacco in drug stores. Specifically, he wants to ban harmful cigs from places like our beloved Walgreens. Newsom, it seems, "proposed an unprecedented city ban on drugstores selling tobacco products, including cigars, pipes and smokeless tobacco."

"This will be the beginning of a national movement," Newsom Evitas to USA Today.

The article goes on to say that drug stores are places for getting healthy--even though drug stores are one of the top retailers of the mylar food group--and we pretty much agree. Or we just don't care. Smokers will always be able to find their sweet release elsewhere, right?

What say you?