(USNewsMag.com) – After over 30 years in downtown San Francisco, the clothing brand Nordstrom closed its flagship store location in the heart of the city.
Nordstrom announced the closure in May. The company has two stores in downtown San Francisco beside one another on Market Street, both of which are now closed, citing a steep decline in sales and a changing demographic in the city’s market over the past couple of years.
Days before the flagship store shut its doors for good, the store was photographed looking like a ghost town with naked mannequins, mostly empty rooms with little to no merchandise, and a handful of wandering customers. According to the chief operating officer of stores, Jamie Nordstrom, downtown San Francisco’s “dynamics” have “changed dramatically over the past several years,” and customer foot traffic” to stores has been impacted, leading to declining sales.
However, the chief officer did not mention the primary reason why foot traffic may have decreased.
Nordstrom’s San Francisco branch is one of quite a few stores that have shut down over the last few years, and several of them cite rising crime rates as the main reason, especially robberies. Target reduced nightshift hours in some stores in San Francisco in 2021 due to the rise in shoplifting and robberies; earlier this year, it was reported some Target stores were locking down their products. Walgreens closed five stores, citing “organized retail crime” as the reason. And Whole Foods shut down after only a year, citing safety concerns for their employees.
Since the pandemic in 2020 and the policy response of shutting down huge parts of the economy at once, small businesses have been wrecked, and crime rates have increased. People struggling more financially on top of feeling less safe when going outside make them less likely to spend money that way, which is also why online sales spiked during the lockdowns.
Because of these crime increases, even higher-end stores were soon no longer able to function in some cities as their clientele with more money began to flee, criminals began to flourish, and law enforcement was demoralized following the public reaction to George Floyd’s death. All of this snowballed into the current situation in most major U.S. cities, which is also being compounded by the migrant crisis.
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