Last week I wrote about conditions that forced Whole Foods to close its flagship store in San Francisco. Contrary to some published claims that the closure was the result of poor sales, a NY Times review found there had been 568 calls to 911 in just 13 months. Employees had been threated with guns and knives and theft was constant.

Today the SF Standard has a story about a Target store located in a mall near Union Square. Just like the Whole Foods, this store is being robbed blind and not just once or twice a day.

“I’d say 10 thefts a day,” said one worker at the Target inside the Metreon, a mall near San Francisco’s Union Square. The worker spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not have permission from a supervisor to talk to the press.

“Every 10 minutes you see it,” another worker said who also did not wish to be named. “Look in some corner of the store and you’ll see people shoveling stuff into a bag, food, cosmetics.”…

A third worker who also spoke on the condition they not be named said lipstick and nail polish, which are not locked behind plastic, are regularly stolen in handfuls.

Like other Target stores in San Francisco, this one has moved to place a lot of smaller items in locked cabinets but anything that can still be grabbed will be. Not all of the thefts are for resale. The homeless frequently steal food and sometimes eat it in the store. Another worker, who isn’t identified by name, says it’s routine to find candy wrappers, soda and even liquor bottles dropped around the store. Another frequently stolen item is aluminum foil. Why? Because the addicts use it when smoking fentanyl.

So if you’re wondering why so many retail stores keep announcing closures in the city, this is why. Recent closures include an Anthropologie store, an Office Depot, two Nordstrom stores and a Saks Off 5th outlet. Yesterday, two more stores in the same area as the Target described above announced they were closing.

San Francisco’s Union Square faced two more major losses on Monday following the pull out of T-Mobile’s flagship store at 1 Stockton Street and the closure of Williams-Sonoma at 340 Post by the end of the year.

The Globe has also been told Pottery Barn on Chestnut street has also closed.

Of course it wouldn’t be fair to say all of these closures are solely because of theft and chaos on the streets. It’s also true that San Francisco’s downtown area has been significantly hollowed out by people working from home a few days a week. The San Francisco Chronicle revealed yesterday that nearly a third of the city’s commercial office space is currently vacant.

Downtown San Francisco is experiencing its worst office vacancy crisis on record, with 31% of space available for lease or sublease. In the heart of the city, an astounding 18.4 million square feet of real estate is available — enough space to house 92,000 employees and the equivalent of 13 Salesforce Towers…

The surge in empty offices means plenty of options for tenants, a major change compared to early 2020, when the vacancy rate was around 4%…

Some of the emptiest buildings can be tied to cutbacks by tech giants Salesforce and Meta, which have sought to cut costs with mass layoffs and office consolidations.

So the retail stores are getting hit from both ends. On one hand their customer base of white collar employees has suddenly shrunk and on the other hand they are getting picked clean by a constant stream of homeless thieves looking to feed their drug habits. Those two forces act like a vice squeezing retailers out of the city. Really, it’s a wonder any of them can survive. It seems likely that several more won’t survive.