Nordstrom to Shutter Both Downtown SF Stores, Citing Difficult Conditions | Hacker News Reader

Nordstrom to Shutter Both Downtown SF Stores, Citing Difficult Conditions

sfstandard.com

32 pointsxqcgrek217 comments

'Difficult conditions' of course being code for 'dangerous shithole'

I think the last word you used was canceled in 2018 for being racist.

It's much harder in the modern era to find a word that isn't racist, sexist, or transphobic.

Even the most innocuous words or phrases can be deemed "dog whistles" based purely on the say-so of people who would be unemployed if racism were to suddenly disappear.

Words don't get to be cancelled. Maybe context, but never words.

Before anyone knee jerks into trying to spin this as an SF problem, and pull in their various political opinions about that city, keep in mind that Nordstrom just pulled out of Canada, shuttering their 13 stores there.

Nordstrom is struggling big time. Not just an issue around SF.

Let’s also just be frank and just say the atmosphere there is also not helping and made any decision even easier.

Well, there's also the whole "work from home" thing which means there's a lot fewer people in SF proper, period.

Yes, let's keep ignoring the issues and point to something else, that will solve it! Not saying it's not part of it but let's not pretend downtown SF is a utopia.

Nordstrom closed its Jeffrey boutiques in Palo Alto, and its store in Escondido (among many others). So, presumably the homeless and crime problems there caused that?

And Westfield can complain about crime in SF but they're just trying to cough up an excuse. UWR completely ejected from ALL their US Westfield malls in 2022 while keeping all their EU malls. Somehow the EU homeless and crime problems aren't an issue but the US ones are. Interesting that.

SF certainly has its issues. However, in this instance, they are completely orthogonal to the reasons why Nordstrom is closing.

The structural changes in the way people shop were bad even before Covid, but the work-from-home contingent fleeing the city (SF has almost 30% working from home--the highest in the nation by the way--and it would probably be larger except many of them left SF) really accelerated the transition.

I was thinking the same thing: their market trends older at time when boomers are retiring and the telework boom means large numbers of people are spending far less on office wear, too.

The other thing happening in the background are real estate prices going up — most of the closures tend to have a quiet “the building owner demanded a double digit rent increase” towards the bottom after the exciting headlines, but it’s rare to get numbers for each of those different factors. Given things like Walgreens’ retracting their claims about shoplifting[1] I’m suspicious that it’s highlighted because it doesn’t require anyone to take responsibility for a bad executive call or say something negative about a real estate company with a lot of lawyers and a high likelihood that you’ll need to deal with them again.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/06/business/walgreens-shopli...

From TFA:

“Nordstrom also announced that it would expand its presence in California, opening five new Nordstrom Rack stores in cities across the state, including one in San Mateo.”

No, sounds like it’s just San Francisco.

Nordstrom Rack is a discount outlet, not their flagship store. They probably have lots of inventory to move after closing all those stores.

yea my interpretation of the move would be that Nordstrom is pivoting their business down market to a different clientele

San Mateo is suburban. San Francisco is urban. They are different types of markets.

So, just because one is named "San Francisco" is not the only obvious criteria why Nordstrom might move out of San Francisco.

Nordstrom Vancouver was actually doing amazing - just not enough to justify a Canadian entity on it's own.

Yeah I heard they were like one of the few (only?) stores in Canada doing well and was propping up the whole venture.

SF may have to pay stores to have presence.

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