AT&T has announced it is closing its flagship store in downtown San Francisco, yet another blow to the city’s struggling retail industry.
The store at 1 Powell Street in the city’s Union Square shopping district is one of the largest in the country and will close on Aug. 1, a spokesman confirmed.
It is the latest episode in San Francisco’s retail apocalypse, in which countless high street retailers have left the city’s downtown amid rising theft and homelessness, which has also driven customers away.
But the closure is also part of a broader trend for the telecommunications giant, which is also closing a store in Chicago. This leaves the company with only one flagship store in the country in Dallas.
“Consumer buying habits continue to change, and we’re changing with them,” AT&T spokesman Chris Collins said Thursday.
AT&T has announced that it will close its flagship store in downtown San Francisco
The store at 1 Powell Street in the city’s Union Square shopping district is one of the largest in the country
“That means serving customers where they are through the right mix of stores, digital channels and our phone care team.”
Collins assured that employees would not be laid off.
“We are proud of our continued presence in the community, not just through our stores and our local investment in world-class connectivity with our 5G and fiber networks,” said Collins.
“Any store associates affected by this change will be offered employment at one of our many other retail locations across the city.”
The closure comes a day after Cinemark announced plans to close its theater in the Westfield Mall, reporting that Westfield said it would close the mall altogether.
Last week, a report from the San Francisco Standard Around found that 46 percent of stores in the Westfield Mall in downtown San Francisco have closed since 2020.
Major retailers that have left the mall since 2020 include: Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Microsoft, Tiffany & Co. and Timberland
About 46 percent of stores — 45 of 97 — in Westfield San Francisco Center have closed as of 2020, according to an analysis by the San Francisco Standard
A total of 45 of the 97 retailers operating at the mall — and 16 of the 36 food vendors — closed their doors in just over three years
Other major retailers that have left the mall since 2020 include: Abercrombie & Fitch, Banana Republic, Microsoft, Tiffany & Co. and Timberland.
Last month, Westfield largely blamed “unsafe conditions” and “lack of enforcement against rampant criminal activity” for Nordstrom’s departure, claiming that San Francisco’s poor performance was in stark contrast to the other locations.
Whole Foods, Old Navy, Gap, and Office Depot are just a few of the neighborhood stores that have announced they are closing stores in recent months.
Of the 203 retailers that opened in the city’s Union Square area in 2019, only 107 are still operating — a 47 percent drop in just a few pandemic-ravaged years.
San Francisco is now widely considered to be stuck in a vicious circle.
Office workers are now working from home, making the downtown area significantly quieter and the empty streets more dangerous. The rise in crime then deters people from going downtown.
And as the downtown area empties, the city loses vital tax revenue and the area becomes less attractive.
The city’s revenue loss from reduced property taxes could reach $196 million a year by 2028, according to models released in November by the San Francisco Controller’s Office.
The modeling best-case scenario expects costs to be closer to $100 million per year.
The number of homeless people in San Francisco was counted at nearly 8,000 in February last year
A significant handful of high-profile criminal episodes, in addition to a number of store closures due to rampant and unprosecuted theft, have tarnished the city’s image with potential visitors.
Tech exec Bob Lee became one of the city’s last murder victims. Lee, 43, was allegedly killed on April 4 by another tech executive.
The number of homeless people in San Francisco was counted at nearly 8,000 in February last year, the second highest since 2005, according to the government’s official census that takes place every three years.
San Francisco saw drug-related deaths rise 41 percent in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same time last year, when fentanyl devastated the city’s homeless population.