Retail giant Nordstrom’s flagship store in a San Francisco mall permanently closed this week, marking the latest store to fall as the city grapples with a glaring exodus of brick-and-mortar shops.
The cause of the closure, according to a mall spokeswoman, included “unsafe conditions for customers, retailers, and employees, coupled with the fact that these significant issues are preventing an economic recovery of the area.”
She said the closure “underscore[d] the deteriorating situation in downtown San Francisco.”
Union Square, San Francisco’s commercial hub, has lost nearly half of its stores since 2019, a local survey found.
Retail crime in urban areas is one of the well-documented factors for these store closures, but an increasingly accommodating environment for organized retail crime and viral surveillance footage capturing brazen incidents of thievery has magnified the problem.
San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento were found by the National Retail Federation to be “hot spots” for organized retail crime for the last several years, signaling the problem may be statewide in California.
Read more at Washingtonexaminer.com
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