Right-wingers keep smearing San Francisco to invalidate progressive policy.
After grad school, I got a job at a Whole Foods in San Francisco because no one else would hire me. It was in the prepared foods section. a) that shit is not organic. b) at the end of every shift they made us throw out piles upon piles of perfectly good food. I was famous at the store for standing over a trash can and shoveling as much broccolini and fennel or whatever down my gullet before having to dump it out. Sometimes we hid the sandwiches in our bags to take home to roommates. The chef’s kiss of this arrangement is that we also had to lock the outdoor trash cans so homeless people couldn’t get the food.
Management pretended this was for safety reasons, but, obviously, it was so that homeless people wouldn’t congregate near the store and disturb the nice rich liberals who shopped there.
The stupid, spoiled tech people act like San Francisco just now acquired it’s homelessness problem, but even when I visited in high school (‘90s) there were tons of homeless people on the sidewalk. Many were missing limbs. Because, see, that’s what we did with people traumatized, mentally and physically, from the Vietnam War: we let them beg for change on the street.
Anyway, apparently a Whole Foods in downtown San Francisco has shuttered it’s mechanical doors “due to crime,” the NY Post breathlessly reports.
“We are closing our Trinity location only for the time being,” a Whole Foods spokesperson told the local outlet in a statement. “If we feel we can ensure the safety of our team members in the store, we will evaluate a reopening of our Trinity location.”
The company said rampant drug use and growing crime led to its decision, a city hall source told the Standard.
The Whole Foods store had already reduced its hours in October last year after experiencing “high theft” and hostile patrons, a store manager said.
A month later, store managers restricted the use of its bathrooms to customers only after syringes and pipes were found in the restrooms, the publication reported.
The city has also been plagued by a lack of foot traffic as many residents are no longer going into offices in the downtown area and are instead working from home.
Countless small businesses have shuttered.
San Francisco’s District 6 supervisor Matt Dorsey said he was “incredibly disappointed but sadly unsurprised” by the Whole Foods closure.
“Our neighborhood waited a long time for this supermarket, but we’re also well aware of problems they’ve experienced with drug-related retail theft, adjacent drug markets, and the many safety issues related to them,” Dorsey said in a statement.
Violent crime rates in San Francisco are low. So “crime” just means homeless people who might have mental illness or substance misuse.
Also, oh my god, Matt Dorsey, relax. SF has one million Whole Foods. Furthermore, you can walk everywhere because the city is spatially tiny. Matt Dorsey can get his fucking wild mushroom and herb risotto at any number of other Whole Foods locations.
It’s closing because no one goes downtown—not due to “crime” but due to the fact that many people can work from home. Downtown SF is like the most charmless part of the city. You usually go through it to get from the Mission to China town and North Beach, maybe hit up a Uniqlo at the mall.
The same narrative—have to close because of “crime”—was spun about Walgreen’s closures during the pandemic. It turned out that the company had so many locations in the city that they were cannibalizing profits. Yet we were told, over and over, that Walgreens was forced to close because of shoplifting.
Yes, the last time I visited, a guy who’d forgotten to pull up his pants sorted through the trash can in front of me while I tried (and succeeded) in enjoying my incomparable Mission burrito. Living in a city means occasional unpleasant sights and encounters. If you don’t like the city, move to the suburbs. The suburbs have good food now!
Among my dozens of friends, the only people who left did so because they couldn’t afford to live there anymore. It is the most beautiful city in America—the closest thing we have to a European capitol (I moved to NYC for stupid work reasons). Yet, there’s been a concerted effort to paint it as a crime-ridden Hellscape. While I’m partly entertained at the prospect of tech people pulling up roots to move to Phoenix or whatever, at the same time, it seems mirresponsible for city officials to … discourage people from investing in the city by moving there and starting businesses?
I wonder if there’s an agenda there? Oh yeah:
The Democrat [Dorsey] said he was drafting new legislation to ensure the San Francisco Police Department is fully staffed within five years.
The department has been down 335 officers since 2017 and well below its staffing goal, the Standard reported.
The more ambitious agenda here is to invalidate progressive policies in blue cities. This is because, due to the cost of housing (which, you know, also doesn’t help re: homelessness) the real estate industry is extremely powerful. And it has its claws in pretty much every big deal big city lawmaker.
San Francisco has serious problems but most stem from being governed by California’s constitution, which rewards landowners above all other classes of society
I live in the Suburbs of Minneapolis, I can tell the Vibe is shifting in a more positive direction. This place is full of corporate Dems and they are getting edged out little by little. The propaganda is thick. Just talking to people they all talk about crime. MN is not even in the top 40 of big cities for crime, I seem to point that out every day now, it seems to settle people down. I worry more about rural areas that are lock step fascist.....and have a rape culture that is untouched and unseen.