“Cracker Barrel this week became the latest company to announce it is leaving the Portland, Oregon, area shortly after Walmart announced its departure following comments from the CEO that crime and theft were taking their toll.

Cracker Barrel, which has over 600 locations nationwide, blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for its decision to close its final eateries in the Portland metro area.

“As a standard course of business, we continually evaluate the performance of our stores, using various criteria to ensure we are meeting the needs of our guests and our business,” the company said in a statement.

“With that, we are saddened that we have been unable to overcome the impact the pandemic had on our business and have made the difficult decision to close the Beaverton, Tualatin, and Bend locations on March 20. The decision to close a store is never one we take lightly, and our focus right now is in assisting our impacted employees during this transition.”

In a statement to Fox Business asking for specifics on what aspects of the pandemic led to the closures, a Cracker Barrel spokesperson said, “Like so many other companies, the pandemic impacted our business, and we have struggled to staff and profitably run these stores. Despite the extra efforts made, we couldn’t viably continue to keep our doors open.” (Courtesy FoxNews.com)

A report posted last November by the Heritage Foundation found that Democrats controlled 27 of the top 30 cities with the highest homicide rates in the country in 2022, due mostly to Democrat policies and soft-on-crime prosecutors.

“Starting in 2016, with the election of the first [George] Soros rogue prosecutor, Kim Foxx, in Chicago, cities with rogue prosecutors have imposed policies that all — each and every one of them — inure to the benefit of criminals, as we have detailed in our scholarship for the past two years,” the report said.

The top three cities with the highest murder rates were New Orleans, Louisiana, with 36.8 killings per 100,000 of population; Baltimore, Maryland, with 29.1 killings per 100,000 people; and Birmingham, Alabama, with 28 killings per 100,000 people, according to data compiled by the Datalytics research firm.

With the exceptions of Republican mayors in Lexington, Kentucky, Jacksonville, Florida, and an independent mayor in Las Vegas, Nevada, the other 27 top homicide rate cities are controlled by Democrats. Of those, 14 had Soros-backed, progressive district attorneys that have enacted policies that favor criminals, including cash bail reform, releasing convicted felons, refusing to prosecute thefts, drug possession, shoplifting, and several other misdemeanor offenses, according to the report.

Homicides in the 14 cities with Soros-backed district attorneys accounted for 1,752 of the total 2,554 killings in all 30 cities in 2022, the report said.

I live in a small town across the Mississippi state line from Memphis, Tennessee, where one of those Soros-backed prosecutors took office as a result of the last Municipal Elections.

Since then, an already out of control crime wave has gotten worse, with shootings on the expressway and robberies increasing in all of the towns located directly across the state line from Memphis.

In fact, a Walgreens just 10 minutes away from where I am writing this closed its doors yesterday at 3:00 p.m., joining the CVS Pharmacy across the street, which had to close a few months earlier.

They were located at the intersection of two state highways, which allowed shoplifters to drive down from Memphis, run in, snatch and grab, and get the heck out of Dodge.

Besides the fact that crime is out of control. restaurants and department stores are faced with a shortage of employees because thanks to the benevolence of Biden and the Democrats, there is still “free money” available to those who do not want to work.

Our cities must be made safe again, and the “free money” fountain must be turned off for the able-bodied who are refusing to get and keep a job.

Otherwise, America, as we know it, will become just another footnote in the history book.

Until He Comes,

KJ