Seems luxury retail is dying more so to cheaper competition from fast-fashion such as Zara, to individualized fashion online from Etsy, to hypebeast brands that seems to target younger demographics, to rising commercial real-estate rents and failure of shopping malls, to competition from delivery services, an an aging target audience (I don't know any millennials or younger who shop at Nordstrom). Retail theft is a drop in the bucket of their cash flow.

Even the article mentions that "San Francisco has been in the midst of what some call a doom spiral, with office buildings and businesses still empty in the post-pandemic landscape." If you're working from home, no reason to make the commute to stop downtown at retailers. The major downtown retailers thrived in the pre-WWII age when people lived close to urban centers, white flight and suburbanization killed the department stores which were the Amazons of their age, in recent decades, this trend has been reversing as people moved into cities, but after the pandemic, if you get to work from home, there's not much to bring you into the city, especially in places like SF with skyrocketing housing prices.