Whole Foods opened its San Francisco super store last March, bringing 65,000 square feet of groceries to the city’s Mid-Market neighborhood. Today, the store is locked up.
The Trinity Place store at the corner of 8th and Market streets was trumpeted as a flagship location at its opening and was one of the largest grocery stores in downtown San Francisco. The San Francisco Standard, an independent news organization that first reported the closure.
Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, confirmed the closing, but stopped short of addressing whether the shutdown was permanent or not.
“To ensure the safety of our Team Members, we have made the difficult decision to close the Trinity store for the time being,” a Whole Foods Market spokesperson told Fortune. “All Team Members will be transferred to one of our nearby locations.”
The store’s Website was taken down along with the store closing.
Matt Dorsey, a member of city’s Board of Directors, said on Twitter he was “incredibly disappointed but sadly unsurprised” with the action.
Retail theft has been a growing problem in San Francisco, with a 23% increase in property crimes from 2020 to 2022, according to the San Francisco Police Department. (Violent crime numbers are up 8%.)
Shoplifting and other theft has been a problem for many retailers throughout the country for the past several months. In December, Walmart CEO Doug McMillon warned retail theft could lead to price rises and even store closures, telling CNBC that theft is “higher than what it has historically been.” And Bob Nardelli, former Home Depot CEO and ex-chairman and CEO of Chrysler, said the problem was “spreading faster than COVID” in the run-up to last Christmas.
San Francisco’s crime problems have been under an especially strong spotlight, however, as tech leaders and venture capitalists have criticized the state of the city. That outcry was amplified this week following the stabbing death of Bob Lee, the 43-year-old founder of Cash App.