The owner of a Queens store located within 13 blocks of 17 migrant shelters says his business “won’t survive” the rampant shoplifting it has had to endure since their arrival.
Chris Sciacco, the owner of Kaiya’s Pallets at 36-37 31st St. in Long Island City, told The Post his store is targeted as many as six times a week by migrant thieves.
“It’s not fair that these people can come into my store and steal willy-nilly and nothing gets done about it,” said Sciacco.
His variety store is a one-stop shop for food, clothing, electronics and staples such as diapers at wholesale prices — and that could be the reason it’s targeted more often than other retail stores in the nabe. It’s now bleeding at least $3,000 a month, Sciacco said.
“It’s affecting the business and affecting our overhead,” he said, adding, “I don’t know if we can continue to survive at this rate.”
And if it continues, Sciacco said: “I am going to cancel my lease. I am barely getting by. 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 business, they only saw three thefts – two of which appeared to be homeless people who stole a candy bar or two, Sciacco said.
But since the shelters opened in the past two years, it’s been practically every day – and “small stuff and large stuff” is regularly taken, 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 total – and discarded the empty box on another shelf before running out.
- Another thief grabbed a bag of children’s underwear this week, pilfered half the pairs and left the half-empty bag, which was to be sold in bulk, back on the shelf.
- Video surveillance from July 11 shows a man sauntering inside the store’s entrance around 11:30 a.m., then brazenly walking out with an entire pallet of Gatorade less than a minute later.
In the hours following the Gatorade theft, “I called [the NYPD] 6 times, waited over 8 hours and not one cop showed up to help me,” Sciacco claimed.
“I also tried to flag down over 30 cop cars on the street and not one stopped to help me or even see what was wrong,” he seethed.
And Sciacco said he’s called the NYPD at least a dozen times over the past year when he’s spotted a thief in his store – but claimed none have shown up to investigate, nor have officers followed up on any of the three theft reports he’s filed with the 114th Precinct.
When he said he reported the most recent theft in-person at the precinct, an officer allegedly told Sciacco, “‘Well, you should hire security.’
“So I explained to [the cop], I’m a one-man band trying to make it in this expensive city – I’m not a corporation that can afford to spend money on those types of hires or I will go out of business,” he said.
The thieves have also forced Sciacco to change how he does business.
For example, “We had to start putting the underwear loose over here,” he said, and motioned to a bin full of men’s boxers, which Sciacco started selling individually for $1 instead of in bulk because it was getting stolen at least once a month.
“The only way to combat the theft and the loss of the whole thing, is by putting [it] loose and keeping it in eyeshot, hoping people won’t steal one [pair] of underwear for $1,” he explained.
With no end to the rampant theft in sight, 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 don’t care anymore,” said store manager Bobby Valiente, who showed The Post the baseball bat he is now keeping behind the cash register just in case — but, luckily, has never had to use.
As of Friday, there were a dozen perpetrators featured on the public-facing wall.
The NYPD did not return a request for comment.