Yesterday I wrote about the shocking conditions that led to the closure of Whole Foods flagship store in San Francisco. These included 568 emergency calls in 13 months the store was open. Employees were threatened with guns, knives and sticks and theft was rampant.
I also noted yesterday that another major retailer, Nordstrom, had announced it was closing two locations downtown, the largest of which had opened in 1988:
The two locations are a 312,000-square-foot, five-floor Nordstrom department store at the Westfield mall and a Rack, its discount outlet, across the street on Market Street. Both locations will close in the summer with the upscale chain department store explaining in a memo to employees that it’s letting the stores’ leases expire.
What I didn’t know is that yet another retailer also announced they were closing a major downtown location yesterday.
Saks Off 5th at 901 Market St. in downtown San Francisco is slated to permanently close later this fall, a spokesperson for the discount luxury clothing retailer confirmed to SFGATE on Monday afternoon.
…Saks Off 5th has been in operation in San Francisco since March 2015.
The San Francisco Chronicle published a map of all the recent closures.
The paper published a story asking what the story could do about the retail exodus.
The loss of Nordstrom, a neighboring Saks Off 5th store and other global brands like Uniqlo, Gap and H&M hurts not only the city’s sales tax base and labor force, but also the vitality of critical downtown streets where tourists flock, helping shape San Francisco’s global reputation.
The city’s economic malaise was brought on by remote work and the pandemic, but some city officials and Nordstrom’s landlord also blamed an inadequate response to crime as a key reason for the spate of closures in the city’s chief shopping district…
Weeks of grim news have fueled a debate over public safety and how the city can best promote an economic recovery — or at least stop the bleeding of losing store after store, which feeds into fears of an economic “doom loop.”…
Nordstrom is still expanding in California despite the San Francisco closures. The company said last month it would open five new Rack stores…
So this isn’t just a west coast problem or just a California problem, this is a San Francisco problem. Matt Dorsey is the Board of Supervisors member who represents the area where Nordstrom and Saks are leaving. He connected those decisions to his plan for fully staffing the SFPD.
That’s why I believe the voter-approved, good-government Charter Amendment I’m co-authoring with @Stefani4CA will make the biggest difference the soonest — by sending a strong message that San Franciscans are committed to *real* solutions on safety. (2/2)https://t.co/2Gxvpw2dzo
— Matt Dorsey (@mattdorsey) May 2, 2023
His police staffing proposal contains this graph showing the decline in staffing since 2020.
The purple line is where the city is supposed to be and the red line is where it is. Of course adding 300 more officers won’t solve all of the city’s problems but it might be a start to bringing the open air drug markets and rampant theft under better control. Doing that might make it more likely people would be willing to venture downtown to shop in some of these stores that are currently leaving.
