Nordstrom to Close Both San Francisco Stores Amid Rampant Crime
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
From the article, early paragraph.
Just like Walgreens and CVS, this store is closing for reasons entirely unrelated to shoplifting and crime but news publications will do anything for clicks. Massive department stores requiring hundreds of staff specializing in expensive goods are a very difficult business to operate in an increasingly online and remote world.
The harsh reality is: nowhere. Department stores and chains all over the world are closing down because their business model is no longer sustainable.
I mean some will continue as online-only stores so the company doesn't go bankrupt and the brand doesn't cease to exist, or else the brand is bought up by an investor to add to their portfolio.
Did the news publications invent this quote just for clicks as well?
The article also points out the city placed two officers in the store.
How many more police officers and/or security guards are needed to get the level of security they want?
More specifically, why doesn't the mall have enough security guards already?
Was the number of guards removed, perhaps to cut costs? Is the mall trying to get the city pay for mall security, rather than hire additional private security?
We've seen this already, like when railroads save money by under-provisioning their own police force, then blame "far-left" policies as the primary cause for the resulting thefts. Quoting the subtitle from https://newrepublic.com/article/165146/union-pacific-package... "Police unions, the retail lobby, and other critics of criminal justice reform have seized on viral images of package theft and shoplifting to push for a rollback of California’s efforts to reduce its prison population."
It's like a wave of crap sweeping over previously decent locations. Two assigned cops are not very useful against a tsunami of crap.
I also had my car broken into right there on 4th St with crowds walking by, but that's a different story.
Nationwide, retail theft increased by 26.5% in 2021 alone. The increase is mostly driven by organized theft rings, emboldened by loose bail policies and undercharging by DAs.
> Much like Walgreens before them, Amazon-owned Whole Foods may be scapegoating San Francisco's petty crime problem and feeding into a narrative in order to avoid talking about the economics of the store they just shut down. ...
> The Chronicle has now spoken to a handful of former employees at the mid-Market store — on condition of anonymity because presumably some were given jobs at other stores — and they have painted a likely picture that Amazon/Whole Foods didn't really do their due diligence before opening this store. ...
> Employees cite multiple missteps on the part of the company, including the placement of a liquor section near the exit doors, and "hiring poorly trained guards who tended to escalate confrontations into violence."
> Yes, apparently someone OD'd in the Whole Foods restroom, but the pure fact that the store had unlocked or unattended restrooms in that neighborhood shows a high degree of naïveté, or just lack of local knowledge. ...
> The point is, many people noted how very empty this store felt a lot of the time — not overrun with crazed addicts, but actually just empty. Would Whole Foods have made the decision to curtail hours last fall, closing the place at 7 p.m., if they were doing gangbusters business and regularly had long lines at checkout at 7 or 8 p.m.? That was also framed as a decision about "safety."