At this SF grocery store, you can't leave unless you buy something

At the Safeway on San Francisco’s King Street, you now can’t leave the store unless you buy something. The Mission Bay grocery store recently installed new anti-theft measures at the entrance and exit. 

New gates at the entrance automatically swing open when customers walk in, but they’re set to trigger an alarm if someone attempts to back out. And if you walk into Safeway and change your mind about grocery shopping, you might find yourself trapped: Another gate that only opens if you scan your receipt blocks the store’s sole exit. 

During my Monday visit, I purchased a kombucha and went through the check-out line without incident. (No high-tech gates block the exit if you go through the line like normal.) But for journalism’s sake, I then headed back into the store to try going out the new gate. 

While I watched some customers struggle with the new technology, my receipt scanned immediately. The glass doors slid open, and I was free. But if, like this person on the San Francisco subreddit recounted, I hadn’t bought anything, my only means of exit would have been to beg the security guard to let me out.

I couldn’t reach a Safeway spokesperson for comment on the new gates before the time of publication, but this is not the first time we’ve seen these sliding gates in SF Safeway stores. In 2023, KPIX-TV reported that Safeway stores in the Excelsior and the Fillmore neighborhoods (the Fillmore store has since closed) had installed receipt-scanning gates at self-checkout. 

“Recent changes were made at select Safeway stores in the Bay Area ... given the increasing amount of theft. Those updates include operational changes to the front end of the stores to deter shoplifting,” a Safeway spokesperson told KPIX-TV in a statement at the time.

In May 2024, SFGATE reported that a few Bay Area Safeway stores had removed their self-checkout sections due to theft issues. The Target at 789 Mission St. in SF also removed self-checkout in 2023, SFGATE reported. The 298 King St. Safeway store no longer has self-checkout, although it is unclear when it was removed. 

Daniel Conway, the vice president of government relations for the California Grocers Association, told SFGATE in 2023 that these measures were part of a growing national trend of “defensive retailing.”

“While I can’t speak for any one company, you see the trajectory of commerce over the last 10, 20, 5,000 years, it’s all about reducing friction for customers,” Conway said. “But now you’re seeing a countervailing trend: armed guards and Tide Pods locked up.”