Grocery retailer Trader Joe's, which refused to cave in to political correctness in its product names, is experiencing new problems with Black Lives Matter protesters in Seattle, according to Breitbart News:

Black Lives Matter protesters pushed their way into a Seattle Trader Joe's demanding the company give "15 percent at least." The group has repeated the tactic of harassing the store's staff and customers over the past few months.

A video tweeted Thursday night shows a large group of BLM activists entering a Seattle Trader Joe's store. They chanted and beat drums as they marched through the grocery chain location.

Seattle has five Trader Joe's locations, and Breitbart reports that three of them have been hit in this way.  It shows that Trader Joe's, which resisted the demands, remains a target, based on Seattle's failure to send police to protect them.

This is exactly how mafia works. Either you pay us something - il “pizzo” it’s called in Italian - or we burn down the place at least. This can happen when the State is absent, that’s why defunding the police in crucial in every mafia system.

— Dadah Umpah (@UmpahDadah) October 23, 2020

No business of any kind can run a business with this kind of shakedown activity going on.  The company is being held hostage to pirates, while the city stands by and does nothing.

As anyone familiar with hostage-takers knows, if Trader Joe's caves on the 15% ransom demand, the next move will be a bigger ransom demand, all in the name of keeping the peace, and BLM, which is obviously descending into a money-making mafia racket, can move on to the next target, taking them down one by one.  The big corporate shakedowns of the past month, which have yielded millions of dollars in revenue, it seems, have not been enough.  They want more.  Trader Joe's is one of the few that resist, which makes it the holy grail for shakedown fanatics.

In Seattle, Trader Joe's has in fact resisted on related matters, and not just in the package labeling.  According to the Seattle Spectator, the company has been hit by march-in protests in early October over its refusal to permit employees to wear BLM gear on the job, plus boycotts to boot.  The Trader Joe's near the CHOP zone this past summer did shut its doors indefinitely, not just because of the chaos and disorder of CHOP, but also because of the wokesterism of many employees.  Who'd want to do business with those kinds of employees in permanent opposition?  They relented when 22,000 customers signed a petition asking them to stay. 

But don't bet on them staying so long as the shakedowns are now a thing from BLM, now that the riot thing has grown old with some leftists noting that it's counterproductive, given that it's hurting Joe Biden's bid to oust President Trump.  Shakedowns are a horrid reality in places like Sicily, Latin America, Russia, and any place where people flee.

We see this way of doing business all over Latin America, for one.

To take one example, just because I am familiar with it, FARC's Marxist narco-terrorists, who once terrorized Colombia and now Venezuela, also conduct business by shaking down business with no police protection, as the police are occupied with arresting political prisoners.

The local shop-owners and farmers in small towns are or have been forced to pay what was known as "a vaccination" to the terrorists to ensure that their businesses didn't go up in flames, prompting vast numbers of them to just shut their doors.  The example is not that far-fetched for what's going on in Seattle, either.

BLM is led by "trained Marxists" who just happened to have learned their tactics at Hugo Chávez's knee.  Here's a piece I did on their pilgrimages to Caracas, where these kinds of shakedowns are what goes on in that hellhole.  And don't think the Chavista agenda they embrace isn't to harm the entire U.S.  Here's one I wrote from 2019.  Venezuelans, too, have noticed the similarities.

Now their successors in the U.S. are turning Seattle into a hellhole, too, complete with Venezuela-style shakedowns. 

Seattle is getting pretty comparable to Caracas without police to enforce rule of law just on crime and disorder alone, but Trader Joe's is no battered Venezuelan storefront shop.  It's a huge national private corporation whose structure protects it from activist shareholders stirring up the pot and agitators calling for woke acts, allowing it to do what it always does which is put the interests of its customers first.  Instead of pay the danegeld, Trader Joe's is in a position to walk out.

It's shown backbone in standing up to rioters, and who knows how many shakedowns it has fended off.  But if it gets bad — and recall that Breitbart notes that three stores in Seattle have been targeted — it may well decide that the cost of doing business in Seattle outweighs the benefits and pull out of the city and open up someplace less mafia-like.

By then, the city may become a food desert — self-inflicted, based on the majority's voting choices.

Image credit: Pixabay public domain.