The owner of a Queens store located 13 blocks from 17 migrant shelters says his business “will not survive” the rampant theft he has endured since his arrival.
Chris Sciacco, owner of Kaiya’s Pallets at 36-37 31st St. in Long Island City, told The Post that his store is targeted up to six times a week by immigrant thieves.
“It’s not fair that these people can come into my store and steal left, right, left, left, left,” Sciacco said.
Her convenience store is a retailer that offers food, clothing, electronics and basic items like diapers at wholesale prices, and that could be why it is targeted more often than other retail stores in the area. It now loses at least $3,000 a month, Sciacco said.
“It’s affecting the business and our overhead,” he said, adding: “I don’t know if we can continue to survive at this rate.”
And if this continues, Sciacco said, “I’m going to cancel my lease. I can barely survive. I don’t see how I can continue at this rate.”
The 4,500-square-foot store opened in 2021 and in its first year in operation they only saw three robberies, two of which appeared to be homeless people stealing a candy bar or two, Sciacco said.
But since shelters opened over the past two years, it’s happened virtually every day, with “small and large things” regularly taken in, said Sciacco, who pointed to a trio of examples in just the past two weeks.
- On Tuesday, a man opened a box containing three bottles of Rogaine, pocketed the bottles (which cost $50 in total) and discarded the empty box on another shelf before running out.
- Another thief this week grabbed a bag of children’s underwear, stole half the pairs and left the half-empty bag, which was to be sold in bulk, back on the shelf.
- Surveillance video from July 11 shows a man calmly walking inside the store’s entrance around 11:30 a.m. and then brazenly walking out with an entire pallet of Gatorade less than a minute later.
In the hours after the Gatorade robbery, “I called (the NYPD) six times, waited over eight hours and no police showed up to help me,” Sciacco said.
“I also tried to flag down over 30 police cars on the street and none of them stopped to help me or even see what was going on,” he fumed.
And Sciacco said he called the NYPD at least a dozen times over the past year when he saw a shoplifter in his store, but said no one ever showed up to investigate and that officers also failed to follow up on any of the three theft reports he filed with the 114th Precinct.
When he said he reported the most recent robbery in person at the police station, an officer allegedly told Sciacco: “‘Well, you should hire security.'”
“So I explained to him: I’m just a guy trying to make it in this expensive city. I’m not a corporation that can afford to spend money on these kinds of hires or I’ll go bankrupt,” he said.
The thieves have also forced Sciacco to change the way he does business.
For example, “We had to start putting the loose underwear over here,” he said, pointing to a container full of men’s boxers, which Sciacco began selling individually for $1 instead of wholesale because they were stolen at least once a month.
“The only way to combat theft and loss is to leave it loose and visible, in the hope that people don’t steal a pair of underwear for a dollar,” he explained.
With no end in sight to the rampant theft, Sciacco recently started a “Wall of Shame” where he posts photos of thieves and notes what they stole.
“It just goes to show that, frankly, people just don’t care anymore,” said store manager Bobby Valiente, who showed The Post the baseball bat he now keeps behind the cash register just in case but, thankfully, never had to use.
As of Friday, there were a dozen perpetrators depicted on the public wall.
The New York Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.