Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship after one year, citing worker safety
cnn.com
cnn.com
As an outsider, it's really interesting how varied everyone's perceptions on this is. How everyone has a different truth. It makes you wonder how accurate history books are, if people cannot agree what is happening right in front of them.
Did I ever feel unsafe? No.
Was it sad seeing a lot of, very obviously mentally ill, homeless people? Yes.
How to solve this? Hard to say.
How safe you _feel_ often has little correlation to how much danger you are actually in. A lot of people are oblivious to their impending assault or murder until just before it happens to them.
Making you feel unsafe is a specific political tactic: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2022/nov/25/fox-news-crime...
The city is a place of both incredible wealth and incredible human misery. It’s shameful to not acknowledge this or the fact that whatever the causes, nothing anyone is doing seems to be making it better.
There is one solution that bypasses politics, bureaucracy, or having to assign people to protect things: let people have reasonable access to firearms and legal recourse in their use to defend themselves and property.
The vast majority of people are normal, decent human beings that won't resort to shooting each other at every argument. The rest would probably pursue deadly force even if they didn't have access to firearms. Yes, US has a disproportionally a larger number of those due to our culture, but the way to fix that is to let former people arm themselves and the problem will be minimized.
There is a world where normal ordinary people with a job and a place to live get guns, while people who are homeless/mentally ill/ on drugs dont.
That sort of implies that we don't go Oprah on SF where everyone and their mother gets a gun. Reasonable access means that you have to meet certain conditions, like not be homeless, have an id, have no criminal record, e.t.c.
I live in SF and it is not at all clear to me how expanding access to guns would either help or hurt the homelessness challenges in the city.
Some argue that it's inhumane to be armed when you're assaulted by someone who doesn't have full control of themselves and isn't responsible for their actions. But folks also don't deserve to die just because someone has completely lost it and is now in the process of beating them to a pulp.
Right now you’re a sitting duck, hoping that it’s someone else’s turn to get stabbed today. Ultimately you either empower law enforcement, which is not happening, or you empower law-abiding pro-social citizens, which is also not happening. The only options people have left are to either suck it up, or move.
The best thing one can realistically hope for is inverting the opportunity cost committing crime the other way, where its generally more favorable not to steal. If homeless people can be shot by security guards for shoplifting, its almost guaranteed that you would see crime statistics reduced overnight. Homeless people would be more incentivized to pursue lives closer to normal.
I hope I'm not making a straw man here, but I think your argument is that people who are going to resort to violence will find a way, even if they don't have a gun.
The thing that always gets glossed over in this argument is how much damage you can do with various weapons.
Yes, there are people prone to violence for various reasons. And yes, people, do get beat with pipes, or stabbed (both big SF news stories lately.)
But you can kill much much more efficiently with a gun. So those prone to violence, with access to guns are able to do much more damage much more quickly and easily.
Look at places like college towns where there are a lot of drunk people, and fights break out. How often do you see people being killed in these regards? These are people of all sorts of mental temperaments, under the influence, managing to just punch/kick/wrestle each other without resulting to stabbing each other, despite knives being readily available.
Even more so, for the people that could be prone to violence but of sane mind, knowing that someone may be armed can be a deterrent for them actually engaging in violence, because most of those people still have a sense of self preservation, not willing to die over someone disrespecting them in some way.
And when that one outlier person who is not of sane mind and violent enough to actually use deadly force decides to go at it, its much better that if everyone else has the means to stop him.
I was not saying that at all.
I was specifically responding to the part of your comment that I quoted, where you said:
> The rest would probably pursue deadly force even if they didn't have access to firearms.
And I was specifically addressing that point and only that point.
My wife on the other hand did not like walking the dog in the evening. More often than not she'd have some random creepy person follow her around and say weird shit to her. Nothing worse ever happened thankfully, but it was regular low key harassment for her.
We sold the place, to a single guy. We had a few couples interested, but in each case, the woman was worried about what it would be like after dark. Rightfully so based on my wife's experiences.
I did however see a very large amount of Giants fans going to the stadium.
I've lived in San Francisco more than 20 years at this point. Some things get better, some things get worse, but overall I'd say it's about the same. I used to work a couple blocks from there, and I just ran past it on Sunday, and the neighborhood was always kinda sketchy. And just a couple of blocks away is a pleasant, upscale grocery store, Harvest Urban Market, that has done just fine.
So I suspect this is something more about Whole Foods than any surprising change. E.g., did the pandemic and the resulting drop in the downtown population in the area put a whole in the store's profitability?
Also it seems like they were threatening to close in 2019 due to exactly the kinds of issues that Whole Foods says is causing their closure: https://abc7news.com/south-of-market-sf-san-francisco-soma/5...
It reminds me of working around there 2010-12. It was very sketchy then, too. I recall my cofounder going out looking for a FedEx delivery that had gone awry, something important coming from one of our investors. He came back laughing because his founder-looking-for-vital-papers energy was misunderstood by the people across the street. Before he could even say anything, they said the methadone clinic didn't open until noon and he'd just have to wait.
I don't think it's fair to go from "people have different perspectives" to "people have different truths" in this context, at least not so easily. If I discard the handful of patently unreasonable takes, I just see people sharing different information that isn't necessarily mutually exclusive.
Source: currently reading a book about the American Revolution from the opposition’s perspective.
Yeah the city is only a 7x7 mile square. But block by block it can be dramatically different.
Check out the map of violent crime halfway down this article: https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/bob-lee-killing-viol...
I lived on Nob Hill for 7 years, it was fairly quiet, always felt safe. We had one unhoused guy who was harmless, you'd see him around.
Go down the hill, and cross Geary and you're in the Tenderloin. Violent crime on that map goes from 64 to 361. People are passed out on the sidewalk with needles hanging out of their arms. There are tents, trash, squalor everywhere.
Go over the Pacific Heights and it's $10-20M houses everywhere.
The Richmond and the Sunset are like any suburbs, just a tiny bit more dense (houses are touching but they often have back yards). Low crime. Sleepy.
After Nob Hill I lived in SOMA for 5 years, just half a block from 6th street. I once counted 12 tents on my block. A guy was tapping the street light for electricity. Needles in arms, people screaming, the sidewalk is a bathroom. Go east of 5th street (or maybe east of 4th) and it's all modern buildings. In the time since SalesForce tower went up, that area completely transformed. It's hyper modern full of high end office and residential buildings. (This is the area where Bob Lee was killed
When I lived in Nob Hill, I felt like I was in this great dense walkable urban neighborhood. Then I made the mistake of moving to SOMA, it was nice that I was close to so many tech jobs, but being exposed to what went on there made me grow to hate San Francisco.
A lot of people just actively avoid those really bad areas. So they never see it. Unfortunately I either lived in the middle of it, or regularly walked through it.
If they want to turn those areas into a Mad Max hell scape, let them, and don’t work anywhere that requires you to risk it out there either. Why be a martyr?
In the end people still actively rent in the luxury apartments in the worst parts of SoMa, so the markets are clearing. Why they do it is beyond me, but to each their own. My guess is that it's the usual new batch of tech space cadets in their 20s who do their time and bail as soon as they need more space, safety and they can afford it.
It was cool. But I cringed every time I wrote my property tax check.
The neighborhood got worse and I got married and my wife didn’t feel comfortable there. Sold it (at a loss) and moved out of SF.
I often miss the City and have found myself questioning the choices that led me away. After this last visit—no more!
To your point, I wonder if it is "boiling the frog." Maybe things didn't change that much in the last 2-3 years, but they sure have in the last 8.
Taqueria Cancun still slaps, though.
In the early to mid 2010s I used to spend quite a bit of time in the TL. There were restaurants and bars there you'd want to go to. Now, you don't even really want to drive through. It's so bad...
I say that because it's a reminder of two things:
1) This isn't really a policing issue (if it were, wouldn't you expect the Feds to police their plaza better?)
2)This isn't really an SF-specific issue, since America has freedom of movement. People go to SF because they don't have better alternatives. I think everyone in this thread who lives in a jurisdiction that would either jail or forcibly remove these people should remember that as they discuss SF policies, since their government (The US Federal Government) is just as capable of solving these problems as SF's is, and can't actually do anything about it with the current toolkit (even in a 10,000 sqft area).
I also send this as a warning to those people, since SF is famous for experiencing social issues a decade or two before the rest of the country - Enjoy feeling like this is a foreign SF-specific thing while it lasts.
Interesting, what other social issues? Do you mean housing for example?
LGBT rights, recreational drug use, Nimby-ism (to your point), Internet socialization/commerce, rejecting elevated freeways, freely moving between jobs multiple times in a career (see: The treacherous 8), voting by mail, bicycle commuting, living alone/not having a traditional family structure.
SF is a place full of wealthy college educated people and as the saying goes “The future is here, it’s just for the rich.”
I’d argue that national trends around a drug use, housing policy, family structure, and Internet usage (phones make being homeless way better than before) are going to make homelessness much more common everywhere, SF is just at the frontier.
Although nothing bad happened to me personally, it just got really depressing and emotionally draining to live in a place where you're surrounded by so much suffering and destruction, and where you have to be hyper-vigilant every time you step outside. I packed up my things and left in December. My mental health and happiness have improved since then.
I don't blame Whole Foods and other businesses in the neighborhood for shutting down. The city leadership, including the mayor and a majority of the Board of Supervisors (SF's legislative body) really didn't seem to care one bit about the problems in that area of the city. Maybe if enough people and businesses vote with their feet, they'll be motivated to actually fix things.
This store was opened in 2022 and presumably the decision to open it was made in 2021, back when people were anticipating a big return to offices and downtown SF in general.
That certainly didn't wind up happening, and SF's downtown hasn't recovered nearly as much as other major metros. A big expensive store at 8th and Market probably saw far fewer customers than they'd planned for. Low revenue could have been a driving factor in the decision to close, alongside safety.
There’s another Whole Foods on Market, which for now is open and seems to be doing everything right across the street from a Safeway that’s been doing everything wrong—more so since the Albertsons acquisition—but to be fair my perspective is limited only to their evening hours when things seem fine. Some of the restaurants that opened up between the two areas are also already gone, either shut down or moved locations. They took their temporal location-based tax benefits to the end of their life and moved on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...
> A Walgreens executive said this week that the company, which cited “organized” shoplifting as a reason to close five stores in San Francisco in October 2021, might have overstated the effect of theft on its business.
> Mr. Kehoe also said that the company had “probably” spent too much on security measures and that it might have mischaracterized how much theft took place in its stores.
I’ve lived in SF almost 20 years, and Walgreens basically exists as a large corner store for people who want gatorade or doritos, and every single in-person pharmacy experience I have had in SF has been awful, sometimes an hour plus wait with 2-3 people in line. Often there are pharmacists behind the counter who simply refuse to talk to anyone.
These days I use Alto, and most people I know who don’t use some sort of online delivery service. In-person pharmacies suck unless you need a prescription with absolutely zero notice, and then they still suck at doing that.
As for the whole foods, anyone could have told folks that was a really stupid location for any sort of retail. That area has been struggling for a long time and the attempted solution was basically, “Bring a bunch of rich people to the area and hope all of the ‘problem’ people get locked up as a result.”
Shocking that did not work.
I think it was earlier than that. Pre-pandemic. Here's an article talking about it in early 2018. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/San-Francisco-s-massi...
Pre-pandemic, one of several possible narratives about that area was that Twitter had moved in successfully and trends were looking up. That was the sort of optimism that brought Whole Foods. I remember that there were some local reactions that they could be getting ahead of themselves.
Businesses were moving in, buildings were getting renovated.
Then it turned the wrong direction again, and now we have what we have.
I remember going for one of my regular walks around there one afternoon a few years ago and noticing that either block of Market surrounding Twitter had a lot of people sitting on the sidewalk. The block with Twitter was devoid of this. Then I saw a nonviolent-looking homeless guy looking tired, attempting to sit on the "wrong" block. Without a beat, private security comes in to protect the techie outpost, maybe he tells them to move one block over. I was kind of disgusted. Like human misery is ok so long as no techies need to see it.
But I also think it was good they they were revitalizing those old buildings. It is unfortunate that the decline of office work has been pretty hard on SF's downtown. I hope it'll be back some day.
But it was fairly common to see someone riding the long escalator up to the exit (the store is below ground) while yelling profanities at the security below watching them leave. When the store opened it used to have a nice selection of hard liquor, but they stopped selling that due to theft. And there are always several people so high they're barely able to stand, pretending to shop.
There is no solution, other than a vast cultural shift towards a refusal to stop glorifying cultures that glorify criminal behavior. This includes the suicidal grimy juggalos and trailer park meth cowboys, the brand- and status-obsessed inner city wannabe crip, and the fuck you I got mine and the fuck you I want yours mentality prevalent across the country (world?) equally.
I repeat: there is no solution to crime. There is only mitigation and reaction.
Please provide the data that shows this approach will work.
This has been tried for decades in every city across the world and it has been shown over and over again that simply being "tougher on crime" does not work.
What seems to work is a multi-faceted approach targeting root causes like inequality, drug use, homelessness as well as better policing.
Keeping criminals in jail so that they cannot commit more crime will absolutely reduce crime. The elimination of cash bail and downgrading of felonies is a joke.
Chicago is a large city and none of these are really downtown. There used to be a small walmart that was actually downtown, but that closed a number of years ago - I do not recall why. There aren't really a lot of Walmart stores in Chicago - there was some kind of fight between the city and company around needing to pay living wages to get the approvals.
Of the closing ones I know the Lakeview store, it is a small/neighborhood store and in a fairly wealthy/pricey location. IMO it was never a great fit for the area's typical resident - there are many other higher end options within walking distance or with parking (which this walmart did not have) - several grocery stores, trader joe's, walgreens, target, whole foods, etc. Without parking or being that close to the subway, it was never the the kind of store that would serve a large area. I'm not at all surprised this one is unprofitable and closing.
They even mentioned that in their press release today regarding these closures.
https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2023/04/11/walmart-an...
Walmart doesn't want this. Walmart thrives on the price-sensitivity of the impoverished and deliberately undercuts local businesses to funnel every cent of profit to the Walton family. They are playing the long-game here: demolish Brandon Johnson's appeal by depriving the neighborhoods that voted for him access to groceries, and keep their chokehold on their non-union workforce in an era of rising living costs.
This would likely result in a social media fallout that they don't want to deal with, considering that the core customer base of Whole Foods overlaps largely with those that at least publicly claim that law enforcement over private property rights is tantamount to oppression.
I can already imagine social media backlash over someone being apprehended at gunpoint after trying to steal a small amount of food. Contrast that with how it would look for someone apprehended at gunpoint at a bank. Almost no one thinks it’s okay to steal just a little bit of money from a bank.
Other whole foods in SF have a guard at the door. Are they armed? I don't know but they have a guard. No one is bothered. Most big stores in SF seem to have security. Target has multiple that stand by the doors.
To be fair, the security presence in Wal-Mart, or in a bank, may also be an aesthetic.
That seems rather “off brand”, and in any event while we could begin outsourcing public safety to corporations, and we probably will, I don’t think that story ends well for anyone.
Sit down at outdoor seating at any restaurant in those areas and there is a guard standing there right by the tables while you eat.
San Francisco is about at that point. Years ago I was sitting at some outdoor seating on a first date and a guy walked up, grabbed my dates glass of wine, pounded it, and said "I'm an alcoholic" making eye contact with both of us, as he set my dates glass back down on the table.
Although to generally protect the community, maybe there’s a way we could do like an Uberpool for the whole town? If only there were a way to get everyone to chip in.
But violent crime is not unique to San Francisco and if you look at the data the city is far safer than many others.
When it comes to issues like this you really need to look at the data as it is too easy to let passions and bias drive decision making. If you could solve crime by hiring more police and locking more people up every city would do that. But the data shows that it doesn't work like that.
"Safer than 2% of U.S. Cities..."
A lot of petty crime stems from inequality and drug use not from career criminals.
And those issues can't be solved by more policing.
However property crime is not low. And downtown, TL, SOMA etc are full of tents and open air drug use.
Shoplifting has been bad in SF since I first moved there in 2009 from Seattle. I was surprised to see Walgreens had nearly everything locked up, and you had to get staff to unlock it to buy just about anything.
But it feels like it's gotten worse. And while I believe the violent crime statistics are likely correct. I suspect property crime goes hugely underreported because people don't think it's worth reporting to a police department that won't do anything.
SF police are severely under-staffed, down about 500 officers since their peak several years ago.
The previous DA wasn't prosecuting a lot of these kinds of crimes. The police might have been on a quiet strike, not really doing their jobs because of understaffing and defund the police politics. This last point is mostly speculation and anecdote. But lots of stories of the police seeing a robbery go down, doing nothing.
And then the rampant poverty you see all over downtown has just gotten worse.
Same way I’m not gonna do any extra work in the office if I know my manager doesn’t care.
Every quarter since we recalled the old DA we've had higher homicides than the year preceding (the old DA had no increase over the one before).
* The voters sacked the old DA. He wasn't doing a great job but more importantly he had picked a fight with the police chief. The police have a tough job in the city and also they have been slacking off for the past 50 years. A security guard can't really intervene in a fight without 1.) risking their physical safety for $18 an hour, and 2.) risking a lawsuit since they don't really have any legal grounds to detain someone.
The store was on 8th and Market. I generally try to avoid that part of town for physical safety reasons based on a number of personal incidents involving some of the the more unpredictable characters in that part of town. I'm not sure what Whole Foods corporate HQ was thinking on that one. The location is just not a good place for a high end grocery store. HQ messed up. I would also point out that Rainbow foods is maybe 0.5 miles over on Folsom and Division. While Rainbow is near a lot of homeless encampments (maybe more than 8th and Market) the people are more steady and I never get the unsafe vibes in that part of town.
And it's more central than their South-of-Market store on ... 4th & Harrison.
The Twitter building's nearby "The Market" grocery might benefit from this closure - it's suffered greatly from the Pandemic, Twitter itself shrinking, and the great Fentanyl-flooding.
No. Shopkeeper’s privilege allows detention for a reasonable time solely for the purpose of investigation of 490.5 shoplifting in the presence of probable cause.
(Dead right on the eighteen dollar bit, though).
I never understood what's the point of hiring security at a miniscule wage. Noone sane will risk any physical confrontation for that money.
If they get stabbed, need 6 months to recover and get a $100K surgery, is employer paying all the bills?
I see this in many places - like a few badly behaved teenagers will jump over the barriers at the tube and the employees are not willing to challange them.
Like do I only pay because I am well-mannered?
Almost certainly. That’d fall under workers’ comp.
The previous DA was doing a fantastic job, he had finally started focusing on violent crime instead of, “quality of life” crime like shoplifting and vandalism. Doing this is difficult because people will (as they did!) post videos online of petty theft or “unruly” people in the streets and people who do not understand how safety is actually created are never going to listen to people who are actually informed.
> he had picked a fight with the police chief.
This is not true. He prosecuted a police officer for murder and put pressure on the police, which have a long history of corruption and rampant racism, human trafficking, etc.. But police unions have a lot of power and influence, the average person thinks that police create safety (they do not! if they respond at all to anything, they respond after the fact with a pencil and paper, and their behavior is often very dangerous - e.g. speeding around the city running red lights when they clearly are not headed anywhere).
The police in SF do not have a tough job, and police everywhere, always slack off. The SFPD famously went on strike some decades ago and were basically shooting out streetlights and holding the entire city hostage, eventually culminating in a bombing on the mayor’s front lawn.
SFPD do not live in SF, almost any of them, they aren’t members of the community, they do not have the community’s best interest at heart. They are bullies who come from the suburbs and basically view all residents of SF as dirty miscreants. If you ask them for help in a violent situation, they will likely threaten you with violence or arrest yourself.
> he had finally started focusing on violent crime instead of, “quality of life” crime like shoplifting and vandalism.
I don't know.
But I have directly seen security from the Target on 4th tackle someone in the middle of the crosswalk, and hit them repeatedly as they took back whatever that person had stolen.
Random people on the street then started yelling at security to stop hitting the person who was caught shoplifting.
He retweeted this on the matter of Whole Foods ->
https://twitter.com/mattdorsey/status/1645547717714915328
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-the-San-Francis...
As the article mentions SF does not have a high crime rate compared to other cities. What it does have that is more unique are issues around homelessness, inequality, drug use etc.
Those need to be solved by real experts who can look into social and inequality programs that can target the root cause in a measured, data-driven and impassioned way. Not hyperbolic, tech-bro VCs.
The problem is that by putting petty criminals in jail they get exposed to career criminals and have their lives permanently uprooted. So often when they leave they simply fall back into crime especially when you don't have solid rehabilitation programs.
And how is the US war on drugs working ? Or is it a little more complex than endlessly arresting every drug dealer that pops up.
Before you dismiss waging war on drugs have you considered waging it seriously?
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime#des...
The theorycrafting was fine, and the old DA was soft, but I prefer to judge on outcomes.
Edit: Nor are a lot of these issues limited to SF. We had a large encampment set up shop right outside our property line, right next to downtown Milpitas a few years back. It grew and grew for over a year, and nothing was done about it until they decided to dig down and cut into a water main that was connected to our warehouse for their own personal use.
If you end up moving out of the Bay to retire, or take vacations, or order goods online, you're in a much better place making $300,000 dollars in one area vs making $150,000 in an area with half the cost of living.
Not to mention the fact that the majority of the CoL is housing, which if you're wealthy enough to make a down payment for is practically free given the rate of land appreciation throughout most of the Bay.
Genuinely curious - who is "we"?
The, "if you're wealthy enough" bit is a massive, massive IF for so many people that live there. It's not true that "the spending power of most people living here is higher" because many are still stretched thin trying to get by due to the high CoL. More than other regions? Sure, but most people in the area? Not a chance.
That disproportionately high number of tech workers relative to other regions is, as you say, what increases the CoL, but it makes it that much harder for people not in the industry, not making those wages, to maintain that CoL for themselves.
Is this going to continue for much longer?
Towards the end they also give an example of a city that is managing to turn this around with some good programs...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis...
The thing is you go to google news, you search Houston violence, which is significantly more dangerous, perhaps the most dangerous big city in the country in terms of violent crime per capita per the above article, and you don't get articles on how terribly violent it is. Houston of course is in a conservative state, SF is a liberal lgbtq+ friendly city where former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is from, so it's fun to act like the city is horrible. The city is not horrible, though the poverty of folks here is making things worse. We aren't building enough housing, wages aren't increasing at the rate that rent is, so we get homeless people, because that's how not being able to afford rent works.
Obviously I don't want there to be any violent crime anywhere, including here in San Francisco. Still it seems far more likely this store is closing for economic reasons unrelated to worker safety. I bet the investor call they do when they release earnings will actually provide a better look at things.
Incidentally we have a pretty good idea of the factors that affect violent crime rates and what to do about it, which is mostly investment in places and people.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/want-to-reduce-violence-i...
people in california flee to Texas (amongst others) because the state, especially the cities have become so hostile. Takes more than a decade to get a building permit some places, cost of living is crazy high, crime increasing, taxes raising. Then they move to afford the lifestyle they want, and continue voting for the exact same policies that caused these issues to begin with
1. https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2023/04/11/walmart-an...