Whole Foods Closes in Downtown San Francisco After 1 Year Due to Crime

Whole Foods (Getty)
Getty

Whole Foods, the hippie-friendly high-end grocery store owned by Amazon, is closing a new location on Market Street in downtown San Francisco due to high levels of crime that have plagued the city in recent months.

The local San Francisco Standard reported:

One of the largest supermarkets in Downtown San Francisco—the Whole Foods Market at Eighth and Market streets—intends to shut down at the close of business Monday just a little more than a year after the store opened, company officials told The Standard.

A City Hall source told The Standard the company cited deteriorating street conditions around drug use and crime near the grocery store as a reason for its closure.

The beleaguered grocery store on Market Street slashed its operating hours due to “high theft” and hostile visitors in October of last year, according to one of the store’s managers. And in November, the store enforced new bathroom rules after syringes and pipes were found in the restroom.

Local Board of Supervisors member Matt Dorsey used a Twitter thread to decry the lack of police in the city:

Shoplifting in downtown San Francisco has caused other stores, and major store chains, to leave. While the city remains a tourist attraction, the city’s downtown area is in danger of economic collapse due to office vacancy.

San Francisco, once run by Governor Gavin Newsom, has become a symbol of urban decay under Democratic Party rule, with homelessness and petty crime forcing many residents and businesses to leave the city.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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