San Francisco, California – San Francisco has had a tough week. First, it was named as the worse run city in America and now major corporations have announced they are fleeing the once great city due to crime. Small businesses have already fled but now AT&T, Westfield and Nordstrom recently said they would also run away from the downtown area.
Reports of AT&T’s closure of its San Francisco flagship, located at 1 Powell Street in the Union Square area, first came about late last week. That will take place in August, with the workers getting “offered jobs at one of the many other retail locations in the city,” an AT&T spokesperson told FOX Business.
The AT&T spokesperson said consumer shopping habits were changing, something that warranted “serving customers where they are through the right mix of retail stores, digital channels and our phone-based care team.”
AT&T is “proud of [its] continued presence in the community” via retail stores, including two not far from the soon-to-close flagship, and its “local investment in world-class connectivity with our 5G and fiber networks,” according to the spokesperson.
In the same month, Cinemark Holdings confirmed the doors of its Century San Francisco Centre 9 and XD movie theater in the Westfield San Francisco Centre mall would shut and stay that way permanently “shortly before the conclusion of its lease term.” It chose to do so after a “comprehensive review of local business conditions,” a Cinemark spokesperson said.
The Westfield San Francisco Centre itself will see turnover as well. Westfield previously confirmed to FOX Business that it and its partner, Brookfield Properties, had pumped the brakes on payments on a $558 million loan for the mall.
The company said the decision to “begin the process to transfer management of the shopping center to our lender to allow them to appoint a receiver to operate the property going forward” came due to “challenging operating conditions” in the area that had impacted sales, occupancy and foot traffic.
