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Whole Foods closes San Francisco flagship after one year, citing worker safety
- rrauenza 4y agoI'm hesitant to post this because its tabloidy ("Seattle is Dying"), but came across this regarding Seattle's problems with crime and homelessness. It's done by their local news channel as a sort of mini-documentary. Towards the end they also give an example of a city that is managing to turn this around with some good programs... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw
- stuff4ben 4y agoWith this and what happened with Bob Lee, what is going on with San Francisco? Cops not doing their jobs? DA's not prosecuting criminals? Couldn't Whole Foods hire armed security to dissuade theft?
- prottog 4y ago> Couldn't Whole Foods hire armed security to dissuade theft? This would likely result in a social media fallout that they don't want to deal with, considering that the core customer base of Whole Foods overlaps largely with those that at least publicly claim that law enforcement over private property rights is tantamount to oppression.
- stuff4ben 4y agoI mean yeah I can see that, but geez, clubs have bouncers and banks have guards. This isn't too far away from that.
- BuyMyBitcoins 4y agoFrom a PR perspective having armed security at a grocery store would invite a whirlwind of bad press and unfair comparisons. Most people would agree that stealing food for sustenance can sometimes be justified. I can already imagine social media backlash over someone being apprehended at gunpoint after trying to steal a small amount of food. Contrast that with how it would look for someone apprehended at gunpoint at a bank. Almost no one thinks it’s okay to steal just a little bit of money from a bank.
- icedistilled 4y agoNo. Other whole foods in SF have a guard at the door. Are they armed? I don't know but they have a guard. No one is bothered. Most big stores in SF seem to have security. Target has multiple that stand by the doors.
- prottog 4y agoI was specifically referring to the "armed guard" aspect. You bet the public response will be different to a Walmart LP person using physical force to detain a shoplifter vs. Whole Foods.
- analog31 4y agoI suspect a more important issue is that attending an "upscale" store is at least partly an aesthetic experience. A heavy security presence spoils that aesthetic. If you want to shop under a 10 x 10 foot grid of security cameras, there's always Wal-Mart. To be fair, the security presence in Wal-Mart, or in a bank, may also be an aesthetic.
- ergonaught 4y ago> Couldn't Whole Foods hire armed security to dissuade theft? That seems rather “off brand”, and in any event while we could begin outsourcing public safety to corporations, and we probably will, I don’t think that story ends well for anyone.
- Robotbeat 4y agoIt’s true. Neal Stephenson does often struggle with the follow through. But in the meantime we do get fast pizza delivery!
- gweinberg 4y agoI think Whole Foods already has private security, for all the good it does them. At least one bay are store did: https://abc7news.com/whole-foods-security-guard-beats-customer-oakland-replacing-the-firm/977998/ https://abc7news.com/whole-foods-security-guard-beats-custom...
- das-hinterland 4y ago[flagged]
- google234123 4y agoWhy can't everyone living in SF just hire armed security to dissuade crime?
- kelp 4y agoI know you're kind of joking. But ever been to Rio de Janeiro? Every restaurant and store in the nice neighborhoods, like Ipanema and Leblon has a least one guard. Sit down at outdoor seating at any restaurant in those areas and there is a guard standing there right by the tables while you eat. San Francisco is about at that point. Years ago I was sitting at some outdoor seating on a first date and a guy walked up, grabbed my dates glass of wine, pounded it, and said "I'm an alcoholic" making eye contact with both of us, as he set my dates glass back down on the table.
- bee_rider 4y agoPeople don’t need security all the time. What we need is like an Uber for armed security. Although to generally protect the community, maybe there’s a way we could do like an Uberpool for the whole town? If only there were a way to get everyone to chip in.
- threeseed 4y agoWhat happened to Bob Lee is tragic and unacceptable. But violent crime is not unique to San Francisco and if you look at the data the city is far safer than many others. When it comes to issues like this you really need to look at the data as it is too easy to let passions and bias drive decision making. If you could solve crime by hiring more police and locking more people up every city would do that. But the data shows that it doesn't work like that.
- rossdavidh 4y agoI don't know the truth of it and there are varying levels of reporting in different cities, but: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/ca/san-francisco/crime "Safer than 2% of U.S. Cities..."
- vxNsr 4y agoPer sq ft, per capita, per any stat you care to look at this isn’t really true if you use the actual numbers and not whatever doctored nonsense people are blowing around to pretend their form of politics/propaganda is better.
- kelp 4y agoThe Bob Lee thing was incredibly unfortunate (I used to work with Bob) but violent crime is actually fairly low in SF compared to similar sized cities in the US. However property crime is not low. And downtown, TL, SOMA etc are full of tents and open air drug use. Shoplifting has been bad in SF since I first moved there in 2009 from Seattle. I was surprised to see Walgreens had nearly everything locked up, and you had to get staff to unlock it to buy just about anything. But it feels like it's gotten worse. And while I believe the violent crime statistics are likely correct. I suspect property crime goes hugely underreported because people don't think it's worth reporting to a police department that won't do anything. SF police are severely under-staffed, down about 500 officers since their peak several years ago. The previous DA wasn't prosecuting a lot of these kinds of crimes. The police might have been on a quiet strike, not really doing their jobs because of understaffing and defund the police politics. This last point is mostly speculation and anecdote. But lots of stories of the police seeing a robbery go down, doing nothing. And then the rampant poverty you see all over downtown has just gotten worse.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vxNsr 4y agoIf I were a cop I wouldn’t expend any effort to chase down a criminal if I know the DA is gonna shirk their responsibility. What’s the point? Law enforcement doesn’t work if the law isn’t enforced. Same way I’m not gonna do any extra work in the office if I know my manager doesn’t care.
- renewiltord 4y agoWhat getting the new DA has shown is that if many people are cops, they won't expend any effort to chase down a criminal whether or not the DA is going to shirk their responsibility. Every quarter since we recalled the old DA we've had higher homicides than the year preceding (the old DA had no increase over the one before).
- vxNsr 4y ago
- blululu 4y agoThis is going to elude a quick explanation. The problems are very specific to San Francisco, so trying to fit this into a national narrative or attribute it to a single factor is not going to work. * The voters sacked the old DA. He wasn't doing a great job but more importantly he had picked a fight with the police chief. The police have a tough job in the city and also they have been slacking off for the past 50 years. A security guard can't really intervene in a fight without 1.) risking their physical safety for $18 an hour, and 2.) risking a lawsuit since they don't really have any legal grounds to detain someone. The store was on 8th and Market. I generally try to avoid that part of town for physical safety reasons based on a number of personal incidents involving some of the the more unpredictable characters in that part of town. I'm not sure what Whole Foods corporate HQ was thinking on that one. The location is just not a good place for a high end grocery store. HQ messed up. I would also point out that Rainbow foods is maybe 0.5 miles over on Folsom and Division. While Rainbow is near a lot of homeless encampments (maybe more than 8th and Market) the people are more steady and I never get the unsafe vibes in that part of town.
- ncr100 4y agoThe location, in my mind, makes sense. It is near upcoming new-housing, and also notorious 6th, so it's likely to be cheap and popular. And it's more central than their South-of-Market store on ... 4th & Harrison. The Twitter building's nearby "The Market" grocery might benefit from this closure - it's suffered greatly from the Pandemic, Twitter itself shrinking, and the great Fentanyl-flooding.
- singleshot_ 4y ago> risking a lawsuit since they don't really have any legal grounds to detain someone. No. Shopkeeper’s privilege allows detention for a reasonable time solely for the purpose of investigation of 490.5 shoplifting in the presence of probable cause. (Dead right on the eighteen dollar bit, though).
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago> security guard... risking their physical safety for $18 an hour I never understood what's the point of hiring security at a miniscule wage. Noone sane will risk any physical confrontation for that money. If they get stabbed, need 6 months to recover and get a $100K surgery, is employer paying all the bills? I see this in many places - like a few badly behaved teenagers will jump over the barriers at the tube and the employees are not willing to challange them. Like do I only pay because I am well-mannered?
- kelp 4y ago> Couldn't Whole Foods hire armed security to dissuade theft? I don't know. But I have directly seen security from the Target on 4th tackle someone in the middle of the crosswalk, and hit them repeatedly as they took back whatever that person had stolen. Random people on the street then started yelling at security to stop hitting the person who was caught shoplifting.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aresant 4y agoGarry Tan - current president & CEO of YC is very active politically in trying to course correct SF (as is PG from afar) He retweeted this on the matter of Whole Foods -> https://twitter.com/mattdorsey/status/1645547717714915328 https://twitter.com/mattdorsey/status/1645547717714915328 (1) https://twitter.com/garrytan https://twitter.com/garrytan (2) https://twitter.com/paulg https://twitter.com/paulg
- syzarian 4y agoAccording to [1] San Francisco has the most police per 100,000 residents in California amongst cities with populations 100,000 or more. According to [2] this is still less than the number of police per 100,000 people in London. Given the prevalence of guns, lack of social safety net in the U.S., and overall higher rate of murders I would have thought American cities had more police than British cities. Note that police forces have gotten smaller in the UK over the last several years and they consider themselves under staffed. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-the-San-Francisco-Police-Department-actually-17079550.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Is-the-San-Francis... [2] https://www.finder.com/uk/police-statistics https://www.finder.com/uk/police-statistics
- aidenn0 4y agoWill passing a bill requiring SF to have a certain number of police officers actually cause SF to have that number of police officers? If nobody wants the job, then they can't exactly press-gang people into being cops.
- capableweb 4y agoAlso, more cops around hardly actually solve any causes for problems, it just addresses some of the symptoms while making others worse.
- dylan604 4y agoin that case, the bar to qualify as a cop gets lowered like the TSA. you can always hit your metrics if you try hard enough. the ol' saying "lower your standards, raise your average" can apply here.
- stathibus 4y agoEvery morning I wake up and thank the heavens that I never took the bait and moved to silicon valley. What a dumpster fire.
- outside1234 4y agoSilicon Valley is a very big area - and yes San Francisco has problems and needs to make changes - but there is a wide swath of cities and places to live that are almost without peer in terms of being great places to live with unparalleled career opportunities.
- jjulius 4y agoAnd most of them wiiiiiiildly expensive. Edit: Nor are a lot of these issues limited to SF. We had a large encampment set up shop right outside our property line, right next to downtown Milpitas a few years back. It grew and grew for over a year, and nothing was done about it until they decided to dig down and cut into a water main that was connected to our warehouse for their own personal use.
- OkayPhysicist 4y agoThe price of living is higher because the spending power of most living here is higher, because we get paid more. What blindly applying cost of living differences to salary differences misses is the fact that not all money gets spent, and not all money spent goes towards things that scale with CoL. If you end up moving out of the Bay to retire, or take vacations, or order goods online, you're in a much better place making $300,000 dollars in one area vs making $150,000 in an area with half the cost of living. Not to mention the fact that the majority of the CoL is housing, which if you're wealthy enough to make a down payment for is practically free given the rate of land appreciation throughout most of the Bay.
- jjulius 4y ago>... because we get paid more. Genuinely curious - who is "we"?
- fishtoaster 4y agoWhile I've no reason to doubt that safety concerns were the primary driver of this move, I wonder if economic concerns weren't also a big factor. This store was opened in 2022 and presumably the decision to open it was made in 2021, back when people were anticipating a big return to offices and downtown SF in general. That certainly didn't wind up happening, and SF's downtown hasn't recovered nearly as much as other major metros. A big expensive store at 8th and Market probably saw far fewer customers than they'd planned for. Low revenue could have been a driving factor in the decision to close, alongside safety.
- prottog 4y agoFlagship stores (which TFA describes this store as) often run at a loss, because the visibility in a highly-trafficked, prestigious area is worth it. That math changes drastically if you have to account for the potential PR headache that this particular location brings.
- SllX 4y agoHighly trafficked? Yes. Prestigious? Not once in my lifetime has that part of Market Street been prestigious. I know there was some lingering optimism going back through the previous decade that things might be looking up, but since then the crime and grime has only expanded further up Market Street. There’s another Whole Foods on Market, which for now is open and seems to be doing everything right across the street from a Safeway that’s been doing everything wrong—more so since the Albertsons acquisition—but to be fair my perspective is limited only to their evening hours when things seem fine. Some of the restaurants that opened up between the two areas are also already gone, either shut down or moved locations. They took their temporal location-based tax benefits to the end of their life and moved on.
- dylan604 4y agoSaying "due to safety concerns" makes it sound less of a failure on the parts of the business decision and more along the lines of "things out of their control". move the goalposts and look like a win.
- sinecure 4y agoWalmart also announced they are closing 4 locations in downtown Chicago due to profitability issues related to crime. Choosing not to prosecute criminals and releasing those that are caught immediately only emboldens and worsens crime. This country needs to crack down on crime swiftly and harshly until order returns.
- INeedMoreRam 4y ago[dead]
- tenebrisalietum 4y agoDid the drug war work?
- dylan604 4y agothat's a matter of perspective my friend. it's working just fine for some, but not for the majority of people.
- infamouscow 4y agoIt's a false equivalency to equate the war on drugs with a city failing to maintain public safety.
- capableweb 4y agoYeah! Why figure out why crime happens in the first place (it cannot be poverty and unavailability of safety nets for people, impossible!) when you can just put all those p̶e̶a̶s̶a̶n̶t̶s criminals in prison instead, so we don't have to deal with it.
- procgen 4y agoWe can do both.
- UberFly 4y agoI am pretty damn poor but don't commit crimes. Crime happens when people decide that's the route they want to take over other routes. It's as much a cultural thing as it is an economic thing. There are wide swaths of the public now in the US making excuses why crime is the best option for many.
- zizee 4y agoQueue the anecdotes of people feeling unsafe, and others who feel completely safe. Queue the speculation about whether this had underlying reasons, other than what is claimed. Queue statements of crime stats being down, and counter claims of people not reporting anything because nothing is ever done. As an outsider, it's really interesting how varied everyone's perceptions on this is. How everyone has a different truth. It makes you wonder how accurate history books are, if people cannot agree what is happening right in front of them.
- wackget 4y agoCue*
- jimmygrapes 4y agoOnly for the first one, after that queue em up
- zizee 4y agoHehehe, thanks both ;-p
- philjohn 4y agoI'm from the UK, but was in San Fran for a weekend last year. Did I ever feel unsafe? No. Was it sad seeing a lot of, very obviously mentally ill, homeless people? Yes. How to solve this? Hard to say.
- sky_rw 4y ago>Did I ever feel unsafe? No. How safe you _feel_ often has little correlation to how much danger you are actually in. A lot of people are oblivious to their impending assault or murder until just before it happens to them.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
- omegaworks 4y agoThis is a coordinated capital strike. Walmart is doing the same thing to Chicago stores in vulnerable food-deserts[1], after a CTU leader was elected mayor. Workers are demanding a living wage in a world where the costs of basic needs are skyrocketing. 1. https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2023/04/11/walmart-announces-closure-of-four-chicago-stores https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2023/04/11/walmart-an...
- ghoogl 4y ago[dead]
- BigCryo 4y agoI dare say the shoppers at whole foods voted for the political policies that led to the closure of the whole food store. So you might say it's kind of fitting
- redeeman 4y agoyou will be utterly downvoted for saying that for sure, but yeah, there is an extreme disconnect in what city people tend to vote, versus what they think will happen from it. Bills nearly always have obscenely misleading(the most favorable word in existence) naming, which is what the media plays in soundbites. The masses, mostly, but not only, left leaning people eat it up in as massive quantities as media can produce.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rossdavidh 4y agoSo, while this is a hot-button issue, I would be curious to hear from any HN readers who live in SF, and go shopping in grocery stores there, as to whether they were surprised by this? I hear such contradictory reports that I would be curious to hear from people with "boots on the ground".
- Overtonwindow 4y agoSan Francisco feels like NYC in the 80s. I think what it needs is a heavier, consistent police presence. There is a lawlessness that demands a heavy hand, but which must be supported because its at a point where that hand is needed.
- WesternWind 4y agoSF's violent crime rate is low compared to most other cities. There's a fair bit of property crime (theft, burglary, etc) though, and drug usage, and that perhaps makes people feel unsafe. https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francisco-problems/crime https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/fixing-san-francis... The thing is you go to google news, you search Houston violence, which is significantly more dangerous, perhaps the most dangerous big city in the country in terms of violent crime per capita per the above article, and you don't get articles on how terribly violent it is. Houston of course is in a conservative state, SF is a liberal lgbtq+ friendly city where former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is from, so it's fun to act like the city is horrible. The city is not horrible, though the poverty of folks here is making things worse. We aren't building enough housing, wages aren't increasing at the rate that rent is, so we get homeless people, because that's how not being able to afford rent works. Obviously I don't want there to be any violent crime anywhere, including here in San Francisco. Still it seems far more likely this store is closing for economic reasons unrelated to worker safety. I bet the investor call they do when they release earnings will actually provide a better look at things. Incidentally we have a pretty good idea of the factors that affect violent crime rates and what to do about it, which is mostly investment in places and people. https://www.brookings.edu/research/want-to-reduce-violence-invest-in-place/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/want-to-reduce-violence-i...
- redeeman 4y agohttps://blog.smu.edu/dedmancollege/2022/09/12/why-are-californians-moving-to-texas-and-how-that-might-change-the-state/ https://blog.smu.edu/dedmancollege/2022/09/12/why-are-califo... people in california flee to Texas (amongst others) because the state, especially the cities have become so hostile. Takes more than a decade to get a building permit some places, cost of living is crazy high, crime increasing, taxes raising. Then they move to afford the lifestyle they want, and continue voting for the exact same policies that caused these issues to begin with
- archagon 4y agoThis was previously flagged. Why is it back?!