The trend has been called a retail exodus. In the past few months there have been more than a dozen store closures in downtown San Francisco. I’ve written about the closure of a flagship Whole Foods which made 568 calls to 911 over the 13 months it was open. A 300,000 square foot Nordstroms is closing as is Office Depot, Anthropologie, Saks Off 5th and many more. The SF Chronicle put together this map showing the recent closures.

And last week another major retailer announced it was closing up. Old Navy will be shutting down its San Francisco store this summer.

The Old Navy flagship store in Downtown San Francisco will close its Market Street location on July 1, a company spokesperson said Friday.

Old Navy has held a lease at the 801 Market St. location since 1997 and held a grand opening for the store in 1999. A spokesperson for Old Navy’s parent company, San Francisco-based Gap Inc., said the way the company “leverages” its flagship locations has changed.

To be clear, it seems that Gap Inc., which owns Old Navy, is not doing well so this closure is partly motivated by larger problems.

The company has been in the midst of a nationwide downsizing that has included announcing it would lay off around 1,800 corporate employees in April. The company is searching for a chief executive after its former CEO, Sonia Syngal, stepped down last July.

In 2020, the company shuttered its flagship Gap store at Powell and Market streets, close to the Old Navy location, as well as Gap stores in Embarcadero Center and Stonestown Galleria.

But there’s definitely more to why this particular store is closing. For one thing it’s not far from the giant Nordstroms flagship store that just announced closure. For another, the store was a victim of constant shoplifting, not just a few times a week but a dozen times a day.

“They’re (shoplifters) there every day. When I’m on the floor walking around I would say at least 12, 14 during the day,” the worker said. “It’s really bad because it’s downtown San Francisco and it’s really out of control.”…

The worker said the flagship store, which is set to close July 1st, was hit 22 times by thieves in the last two days. And in the last year, the problem has worsened.

“I recognize a lot of them and they’re just super comfortable, sometimes they’ll take two or three mesh bags at a time, and that sometimes is $2,000 worth of stuff,” they said…

the Old Navy worker said shoplifters regularly curse, throw things at them, or worse.

Old Navy has released a typical, bland statement about “evaluating its real estate portfolio” and saying nothing at all about crime. That works out great for city leaders like Mayor London Breed who said last week that the recent string of departures was not about “the issues and the conditions.” But clearly if $5,000 of merchandise is walking out of the store every day, there’s no way for that store to succeed.

Here’s the KPIX report about the conditions at Old Navy. It’s not so different from the NY Times report about the conditions at Whole Foods.