A pizza restaurant manager spoke to Fox News Digital about the growing danger that crime and theft poses to his business, and small businesses in general, in Oakland, California.
“It’s been really bad in Oakland,” Cybelle’s Pizza manager Nestor Sanchez told Fox News Digital, explaining that locals have been “getting robbed in the streets.”
“It’s just been really bad and people are afraid to come out now,” he said. “It really affects all small businesses.”
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Sanchez said that many of the small businesses in the Dimond District are family owned, explaining that it was especially difficult for people who started off “from the very beginning” in their business to have to contend with robbery, theft and vandalism.
“It’s breaking their dreams of becoming a business owner,” he said. “It’s bad to see that.”
Sanchez has faced multiple robbery attempts over the past few months and even went viral in February for defending the store with a hammer when a suspect entered the store and tried to jump over the counter.
CCTV footage of the attack showed Sanchez and another employee using a hammer and a recycling bin to scare off the would-be robber.
“They were using whatever they had on hand. They were trying to help the cashier, because they [didn’t] want to leave him alone,” Cybelle’s Pizza owner Elizabeth Sanchez previously said of her employees who were forced to defend the store.
“As an immigrant, as a Mexican, this is my American dream,” she said. “But where is it going? I believe it’s going to the trash now.”
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Sanchez also said that customers feel unsafe coming to visit local businesses because “they don’t feel safe and welcome anymore” due to the sharp rise in crime. (Fox News)
Sanchez also told Fox News Digital that customers feel unsafe coming to visit local businesses because “they don’t feel safe and welcome anymore” due to the sharp rise in crime.
When asked about hiring security to help protect the store from criminals, Sanchez said that he and store ownership has “considered” that but the dramatic loss in sales as a cascading effect of crime has made it difficult even to “survive,” let alone pay additional costs for security.
That desperation to just “survive” as a business in Oakland has had serious effects on staff as well, Sanchez explained.
“We cut our hours for employees because … we haven’t been making profits. It’s really sad for us to do that, you know? We don’t want to go ahead and not be able to provide work for them. We want them to give them more hours,” he said.
Other businesses have also been affected by the rise in crime, including larger chains like Trader Joe’s and Peet’s Coffee. Even Wells Fargo has been affected, Sanchez said.
“We’re trying to survive day by day,” he said.
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When asked if he had a message for Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and local officials, Sanchez encouraged them to “create a fundraiser or at least provide some kind of fund for all businesses that have been really affected by robberies” and up the level of police patrols “everywhere in Oakland” and not just in “here in Dimond District.”
“A lot of people are scared now,” he said.
Sanchez added that his general message for the city and for anyone interested was that he was sharing a fundraiser to “try to make Oakland the Oakland that it was back in the days [when] people felt safe to walk down the street, or even to come down and support small businesses or even big [businesses] like In-n-Out.”
Sanchez responded to a recent movement by some Oakland business owners to stop paying taxes until the government does its part to protect citizens, saying that he believed it was likely an attempt to get the “attention of the mayor or the government.”
Thao’s office did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
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