Starbucks will close seven stores in San Francisco. The company says this is because it regularly looks at its store map to find underperforming locations. However, it could be because San Francisco is falling apart. (Here are the best independent coffee shops in each state.)
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According to CNN, “Each year as a standard course of business, we evaluate the store portfolio to determine where we can best meet our community and customers’ needs.” That may be fair enough. Starbucks has 37,222 locations around the world. Of these, 17,592 are in North America. The stores drove revenue of $9.2 billion last year.
San Francisco was one of the world’s most beautiful cities until recently. It has a number of iconic buildings and some of the most expensive hotels in America. San Francisco and San Jose were home to the richest industry in the world as America’s tech center.
Since the start of the pandemic, the city’s property crimes have soared. Downtown has almost been taken over by the homeless and drug addicts. Both tourists and residents believe downtown is unsafe, and foot traffic has dropped to a trickle of people.
Among the large retailers who have left are Old Navy, Whole Foods, Nordstrom, Banana Republic and Crate & Barrel. Several large companies no longer have headquarters there. These include Meta (parent of Facebook), Snap, AirBnB, Salesforce and Autodesk.
San Francisco is likely to lose population for the first time in decades. If the city cannot be turned around, its fortunes will head in the direction of Detroit and Cleveland. They were once great cities that were barely shadows of themselves and could not be saved by the government or the large tech industry.
Starbucks is just one of the companies in the city that has started to cut back. It will not be the last.
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