Nordstrom used a lot of cryptic gobbledy-gook to explain its decision to abandon Democrat-run San Francisco after 35 years, but we all know why. Due to left-wing policies involving crime and the homeless, the once-storied City by the Bay is in a Death Spiral.
When Nordstrom announced in May it was closing, a spokesman said that the “dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years, impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.”
Lol.
This is no simple storefront, either. This Nordstrom is/was a 312,000 square foot, five-story department store, an anchor store in the Westfield shopping mall.
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And now that Nordstrom is leaving, the people who run the mall are also walking away. They also offered some cryptic gobbledy-gook about the “challenging operating conditions in downtown San Francisco, which have led to declines in sales, occupancy and foot traffic.”
A sad but inevitable tale when you vote for Big City Democrats:
Once a bustling retail center in the heart of the city, the San Francisco Centre has taken a significant hit in the past few years. Total sales have fallen from $455 million in 2019 to $298 million in 2022, and foot traffic has plunged from 9.7 million visits in 2019 to 5.6 million in 2022, according to Westfield.
Westfield’s exit marks another significant setback for San Francisco, which saw its economy hit hard by the pandemic as many Silicon Valley companies allowed flexible work-from-home policies, resulting in many white-collar workers filtering out of the city. Three years later, corporate America has yet to return in the same numbers: Office vacancies in San Francisco have reached a 30-year high.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
You lock down your city for no scientific reason.
You refuse to punish criminals.
You demoralize the police into inaction.
You basically decriminalize shoplifting by making any theft under $1,000 a misdemeanor.
Oh, let me look into my crystal ball to see how this turns out…
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People will not shop where they don’t feel safe. I saw this happen in Milwaukee. Northridge was a gorgeous mall, a 975,000 square foot utopia, a place to meet friends, grab a bite to eat, see a movie… But in the mid to late eighties, a criminal element moved in, and the Democrat-run city refused to do anything about it. We stopped going. So did everyone else. Now it’s vacant.
Don’t you dare blame e-commerce for Nordstrom’s collapse. This “bustling retail center” made nearly a half-billion dollars in 2019 when there was just as much e-commerce competition as today.
America proved again and again in the 1990s that urban decay and decline are not only avoidable they are reversible. Urban decay was a given in the 60s and 70s. Then the New Democrat came along, guys like Bill Clinton, who said we Democrats must be tough on crime. Everything changed. Hell, in New York City, people voted for a Republican mayor, Rudy Giuliani, who turned the city into a jewel.
After less than a decade of Democrat rule, it’s a dump again.
You don’t need Charles Bronson out there patrolling the streets. All you need are zero-tolerance policies for crime, vagrancy, trespassing, and squatting. That’s it. That’s all it takes. But Democrats refuse to do this because Democrats want to chase all the decent people out of their cities and states, knowing it will forever cement their hold on power. They live like powerful kings, while the morons who vote for them live like serfs.
This is all a choice, and it’s a choice made by the citizens of these doomed cities who choose to vote for Democrats.
They are getting what they voted for, and no one should pity them.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.