New time-delay safe technology has been put in all 838 CVS pharmacies in Florida, including the ones in Target shops.
The technology was put in place to stop drugstore robberies and the criminal sale of banned substances like oxycodone and hydrocodone, which are opioid painkillers.
Ricardo Lopez, who is in charge of the CVS region, said that the safes’ electronic features will make it harder for thieves to break in.
“They want to go to the store and get out as fast as possible. The wait serves as a barrier,” Lopez said.
Armed robberies are nothing new for people who work in pharmacies in Florida.
In 2019, News 6 said that a guy named Louis Curler went into a Daytona Beach Walgreens with a gun and asked for drugs.
In a 911 call, a worker said, “We just had a man with a rifle jump the pharmacy counter.” He is armed.”
Before that, in 2017, officers from the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office looked into a robbery at the Pierson Community Pharmacy. A man with a gun forced workers to show him where the pill bottles were kept in a safe.
In the same year, a scary robbery was caught on camera at a Walgreens in Lakeland. The thief threatened to shoot the pharmacist if she didn’t give him several bottles of oxycodone and Percocet.
Lopez said, “We know that this will be a challenge for us.”
Lopez said that retail crime is a threat to communities in Florida, so it is important for stores, police, and government leaders to work together to solve the problem.
CVS Health put in place time-delay safe technology for the first time in Indianapolis in 2015. At the time, the company said, there were a lot of drugstore crimes in Indianapolis.
After the technology was put in place, there were 70% fewer thefts from pharmacies in that area.
A CVS representative also said that the number of robberies at stores with safes has gone down by 50%.
