Legal Insurrection reported last week on how Whole Foods abruptly closed their flagship store in San Francisco “for the time being,” citing concerns over employee safety.
“To ensure the safety of our Team Members, we have made the difficult decision to close the Trinity store for the time being,” the company wrote in a statement on their decision to close the doors to a store that had only been in operation for just over a year.
According to the San Francisco Standard, a City Hall source told them that Whole Foods “cited deteriorating street conditions around drug use and crime near the grocery store as a reason for its closure.”
Unfortunately, San Francisco isn’t the only soft-on-crime city, with areas formerly filled with shops now looking like ghost towns and war zones as a result of drug and crime problems. Portland, Oregon, has been dealing with a steady stream of businesses announcing closings over the same issues, with the most recent one being REI’s Portland location:
The REI store in Portland’s Pearl District will close at the end of February 2024, the company announced on Monday.In a letter to REI members, the company cited concerns over safety and an increase in crime over the last few years as reasons for the closure.”The safety of our employees, members and customers is always our number one priority. In recent years, Portland has been dealing with increased crime in our neighborhood and beyond. Last year, REI Portland had its highest number of break-ins and thefts in two decades, despite actions to provide extra security,” REI said in its letter.
Though REI had reportedly tried to work with Portland’s Democratic Mayor Ted Wheeler in recent months to address the problems, along with making significant investments in security improvements and allegedly trying and failing to get their landlord to work with them, their efforts ultimately didn’t succeed:
“The extra security measures required to keep customers and employees safe are not financially sustainable,” [REI spokesperson Megan] Behrbaum said. “We will continue to invest in these areas through the remainder of our lease, but cannot justify continuing this expense through a lease extension beyond early 2024.”
And sadly for Portland residents, that REI store isn’t the only business Portland has lost in recent weeks:
Cracker Barrel, which has over 600 locations nationwide, blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for its decision to close its final eateries in the Portland metro area.”As a standard course of business, we continually evaluate the performance of our stores, using various criteria to ensure we are meeting the needs of our guests and our business,” the company said in a statement.”With that, we are saddened that we have been unable to overcome the impact the pandemic had on our business and have made the difficult decision to close the Beaverton, Tualatin, and Bend locations on March 20. The decision to close a store is never one we take lightly, and our focus right now is in assisting our impacted employees during this transition.”[…]Cracker Barrel’s decision comes shortly after Walmart announced it was closing all of its Portland stores due to financial reasons.”We have nearly 5,000 stores across the U.S. and unfortunately some do not meet our financial expectations,” Walmart said in its announcement, according to KPTV. “While our underlying business is strong, these specific stores haven’t performed as well as we hoped.”
Cracker Barrel shuttered their Jantzen Beach location in Portland last August due to ongoing security and drug issues. A nearby restaurant also shut its doors at the time, although temporarily, for the same reasons.
Walmart also announced last week that it would be closing four Chicago locations, which they say have not been profitable since their respective openings.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon told CNBC late last year that “Theft is an issue. It’s higher than what it has historically been” and indicated that what CNBC called “a lax approach from prosecutors” could be a deciding factor in whether to close locations.
Relatedly, Coava Coffee Roasters in Portland closed down their SW Jefferson Street location last Thursday, noting that “team members at this cafe have been on the front line enduring extreme violence and criminal activity on an almost daily basis for the last few years– crime and violence that is only increasing in frequency and severity.” And that wasn’t all they had to say on the subject:
“We have brought all the resources to bear that we have access to: doubling up on shifts, locking one entrance, de-escalation training, hazard pay, and heightened management oversight. This has proven to not be a temporary situation—and it is not a situation we can manage,” Coava Coffee wrote. “Most importantly, it is not a situation where we can thrive. We cannot continue operation here as we cannot ensure the safety of our team and customers. Our neighboring businesses have seen it, too – and we’ve watched them close one by one over the past few years. Sadly, we now join them.”
There are many more similar stories where that came from, but I think the point has been made.
The common denominator in all of these announcements is the fact that they are in Democrat-run cities where soft-on-crime policies and woke prosecutors rule the day, with bail reform laws, repeat offenders, and reduced penalties being the perfect recipe to keep the lawless chaos going. And unfortunately, it’s innocent people who pay the price as a result of voters routinely putting the same kind of so-called “leaders” in office while expecting a different outcome.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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