93 degrees at work: Pasadena businesses swelter after copper wire thefts wreck AC units
Thieves stripping copper wire from AC units have turned Pasadena kitchens into 93-degree ovens, exposing how property crime quietly cripples small businesses the state pretends to protect.
Inside the Sweet Red Peach bakery in Pasadena, the kitchen now routinely hits 93 degrees. That's not a heat wave. That's the new normal after thieves ripped copper wiring from the air-conditioning units, leaving the ovens running and the staff baking right alongside the bread.
Business owners didn't choose this sauna. Copper thieves did, targeting the valuable metal inside the condensers that keep commercial kitchens tolerable. The result is lost productivity, spoiled ingredients, and workers enduring conditions no labor regulator would tolerate in a different context. Yet the thefts continue with little apparent deterrent.
One bakery isn't an outlier. Across Pasadena, similar hits have wrecked AC systems at other storefronts, forcing owners to choose between shuttering during peak summer or operating in temperatures that would close a public school. The pattern reveals how street-level crime cascades into economic damage the state's progressive prosecutors rarely acknowledge.
Local officials express concern and promise more patrols, but the stolen copper keeps flowing to scrap yards while businesses absorb repair bills running into the thousands. Employees at Sweet Red Peach now rotate shorter shifts to avoid heat exhaustion, a silent tax on the very people California claims to champion.
The contradiction is glaring: Sacramento floods the zone with climate rhetoric and workplace safety rules, yet cannot keep opportunistic metal thieves from turning legitimate enterprises into sweatshops. Small-business owners are left improvising fans and ice packs while waiting for a response that matches the rhetoric.
What happens when the next heat wave arrives and more units fail? The bakeries won't be the only ones sweating.
Original reporting: LA Times.
Original reporting: LA Times, California.
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