Hungry bears caught on video ransacking grocery stores in this California town

Adina Baidoo was leaving the Safeway in Kings Beach, California, when she was startled by a high-pitched scream, she told KUTV.

“I looked up, and it is a good thing because I almost walked into the bear,” Baidoo said.

She captured a video of the bear eating garbage near a trash can and another video as the bear wandered into the store on Aug. 18, KUTV reported. It wouldn’t be the last time a bear stole from the Safeway, though.

Video from Aug. 27 shows another bear — it’s unclear if it was the same one — leaving the store with a “plastic container in its mouth,” Today reported. There were no reported injuries for either instance.

Safeway isn’t the only store experiencing problems with bears in Kings Beach, a town on the north side of Lake Tahoe. Surveillance videos captured inside a Chevron convenience store on Aug. 30 show a bear eating candy and crackers on the floor, KOVR reported.

It wasn’t the first bear to pay Chevron a visit — another was seen inside the store on Aug. 12, according to KOVR. Surveillance video recorded the moments when an employee tried and failed to keep a bear out of the store on Aug. 29, KOVR reported.

“It was kinda scary, yeah, I’m not going to lie,” Paul Heigh, the employee in the video, told KOVR. “It’s not in the job description no, not at all. Fighting off bears was not in the job description.”

The Bear Education Aversion Response (BEAR) League says spraying Pine-Sol on the wood around doors and windows can help mask the odor of food inside a building.

This story was originally published September 2, 2020 at 10:49 AM with the headline "Hungry bears caught on video ransacking grocery stores in this California town."