T-Mobile has announced that its flagship store in downtown San Francisco will be shutting down thanks to plummeting foot traffic and rising crime.
The 17,000-square-foot facility was located in the upscale Union Square and T-Mobile seemed to want to keep the closure quiet. T-Mobile claimed to be "reshaping" its business model while still operating stores in other areas nearby.
T-Mobile shutting down its Union Square location follows a pattern of major brands and retailers escaping downtown San Francisco and its crime.
Nordstrom and Whole Foods have packed up and left San Francisco even as they expand in other areas in the Bay Area. So obviously, something is wrong in San Francisco itself.
Where T-Mobile has been quiet about their flight from San Francisco, Whole Foods has been relatively open about why they left.
They said that they shuttered their flagship location in San Francisco last month because of rampant drug use and criminal activity.
Under leftist leadership, San Francisco has become a sanctuary for lawlessness and the homeless. In many ways, San Francisco shows us what soft-on-crime policies look like in practice--maps showing where the homeless have used the streets for a toilet and stores that can't make a profit because shoplifters are not punished, and are therefore encouraged to come back and steal some more.
Other major retailers have either been forced to adapt or outright leave San Francisco because of its out-of-control crime.
Many residents are also taking flight, and census data found that a stunning 40% of residents plan to move in the coming years.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed (D) claims she wants to grow San Francisco for the future, but it seems she has accelerated San Francisco's collapse.
Mayor Breed, like many other leftists, supports defunding the police and has made cleaning up the streets incredibly difficult.
Soft-on-crime policies have created organized retail theft, which largely explains why so many businesses are fleeing to places where the police are allowed to do their jobs.
Businesses are losing large amounts of inventory to organized retail theft because police have been told not to act against it, and these soft-on-crime policies are going to get people killed as both criminals and business owners become emboldened.
San Francisco and the leftist policies of Mayor Breed are a total failure and should serve as an example to the rest of the nation for how to ruin a city.
