San Francisco’s decline quickens: Macy’s plans to close its flagship store
Macy’s has been on San Francisco’s Union Square since 1945. For decades, its flagship San Francisco store has occupied most of the south side of the square. That’s why, when news broke that Macy’s planned to shut down 150 of its stores, it seemed inconceivable that the Union Square store would be on the chopping block. However, that’s exactly what’s happened, as Macy’s has announced that it’s joined the exodus of major retailers leaving the crime-plagued city.
For decades, Macy’s presided over the city’s storied Union Square (which has roots in the Civil War), first with its original store and then with the additions of the old City of Paris and I. Magnin buildings. I shopped there a lot, having grown up, lived, and worked in the city.
By the 2000s, Macy’s was a weird amalgam of incredibly expensive couture clothing and cheap sales items. It wasn’t clear how it made a profit. Well, it turns out that Macy’s cannot turn a profit, which is why it’s shutting down 150 stores nationwide:
Macy’s, an anchor of so many shopping malls, plans to close 150 department stores in a bid to reinvigorate sales and shift its public image more toward luxury goods.
The company on Tuesday said it will shutter “underproductive” stores, while opening more of its better-performing, higher-end siblings: Bloomingdale’s and beauty-focused Bluemercury. Macy’s also plans to add smaller stores at outdoor shopping centers, which have been growing in sharp contrast to indoor malls.
All this is part of a do-or-die task for the quintessential American department store under a brand-new CEO. His plan, dubbed “A Bold New Chapter,” appears to acknowledge that Macy’s for years has been losing its traditional middle-class shopper — both to the yawning wealth gap dividing America and simply to other retailers, including brands that sell directly online.
The big surprise, of course, is that Macy’s is including in the shutdown its bazillion square feet of retail space on Union Square, a move the San Francisco Chronicle accurately characterizes as a “devastating blow to downtown”:
Macy’s will close its massive flagship store in Union Square, San Francisco officials said Tuesday, a major setback to the city’s premier shopping district and its larger downtown recovery efforts during an election year.
The store will remain open until the company finds a buyer for the property, Mayor London Breed said in a statement Tuesday morning. The Chronicle has learned that the store will remain open until at least 2025.
[snip]
Macy’s massive, 400,000-square-foot Union Square store — which spans nearly an entire block fronting Geary Street between Powell and Stockton streets — is the company’s last outpost in San Francisco. Macy’s presence in the city dates to 1947 and its store is a landmark on the south side of Union Square. Its loss marks one of the biggest retail closures the city has ever seen, on top of the loss of a nearby Nordstrom that had been open since 1988 and dozens of smaller retailers since the pandemic.
That last quoted sentence tells the real story: The city, under its hard-left aegis, is losing its retailers.
Last August, CNN noticed that “nearly 40 retail stores have closed in Union Square’s zip code since 2020, while dozens more have closed in the surrounding area.” The same article sums up the causes, although it tries to downplay the horrors shoppers and workers experience when confronted by the euphemistically named “unhoused” population and soft-peddles retail theft:
The city’s working population has yet to return to the office at the same levels as other major cities, adding to a decline in foot traffic downtown. According to US Census estimates, many residents have left the city: San Francisco County’s population declined by more than 60,000 people, or more than 7%, from 2020 to 2022.
In addition, San Francisco’s downtown has experienced a rise in its unhoused population. Thirty percent of the nation’s homeless population live in California, and most attribute their situations to the high cost of housing in the state, according to the results of a University of California, San Francisco survey released in June. The median sale price of a home in San Francisco is currently $1.32 million, making it 214% more expensive than the national average, according to data from Redfin.
As San Francisco’s downtown area has emptied over the last three years, property crimes and retail thefts have risen, according to San Francisco Police Department data. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, whose corporate headquarters used to be in nearby Palo Alto, said in a recent tweet that San Francisco felt “post-apocalyptic.”
Violent crime in San Francisco has remained relatively low in recent years compared to other major cities in the United States, however.
Another problem, writes the article, is the drop in tourism dollars. CNN blames residual pandemic fear, but only lefties still care about it.
I sense that tourists don’t want to go to a city drowning in feces and one in which they may be mugged or have all their luggage stolen from their car within minutes of touching down in the city. Why bother? There are other beautiful places in America (I recommend Charleston, SC) that are both clean and relatively safe.
Just as Biden shows what leftism does to a nation, San Francisco reveals what it does to a local community: It’s lockdowns, drugs, crime, filth, hostility to business interests, crazy sex and nakedness in public, and everything that wears down a population, sends away money, and frightens tourists. With Ronna McDaniel finally leaving the RNC, maybe that organization will stop buying flowers for itself and start selling the “This is your nation on leftism” message to the American voter.
Image: Macy’s on Union Square montage made using photos by BrokenSphere (CC BY-SA 3.0); Marc Hogan (CC BY-SA 4.0); Binksternet (public domain); D’Arcy Norman (CC BY 2.0); and Another Believer (CC BY-SA 3.0).