As Beege pointed out earlier this week, the owners of Westfield Mall in downtown San Francisco have announced that they’ll be giving the property over to the lender. The mall had already lost Nordstoms last month and this week the Cinemark movie theater also announce it was closing. In fact, today is the theater’s last day.

The Cinemark movie theater complex sent an email to its customers announcing its final films would play Thursday, and the complex would close on Friday.

In a statement to The Standard, Cinemark confirmed the decision to permanently close the Century San Francisco Centre 9 and XD theater shortly before the conclusion of its lease term, attributing the shutdown to a “comprehensive review of local business conditions.”

What kind of business conditions? Oh, those kind of conditions.

Seeing feces on the ground is not uncommon in the city by the bay. But human waste has been showing up somewhere else: the elevators in Downtown San Francisco’s Westfield Centre.

“It’s like twice a week now. It used to be once a month,” said Abimael Garcia, who manages janitors at Westfield. “So lately, it’s increased.”…

Kim said she saw feces in one of the elevators that leads from the theater to Mission Street about two weeks ago, and that someone appeared to have stepped in it.

Speaking of business conditions at Westfield Mall, we’re getting a bit more detail on the problems the mall was facing thanks to a story in the San Francisco Chronicle. The city had agreed to provide two on duty officers to patrol the site and the mall had also hired two off-duty officers. But it wasn’t enough.

One Westfield executive said in a February email, which The Chronicle obtained through a public records request, that staff from the youth jewelry store Claire’s had reported that “there was not much slow down” in shoplifting incidents at the store since the city added officers to the mall.

Emily Weber, a vice president at Westfield’s parent company…wrote Feb. 9 that, in addition to the concerns raised by Claire’s, “I’m also hearing now from our center team that there were two incidents yesterday where people were held up by knife point at the center for theft.”

Claire’s closed the location in March. But they weren’t the only store complaining:

“We urgently need to discuss Westfield,” wrote Sami Archondo, vice president of retail at Ted Baker, in an October email to other top executives at the clothing store chain.

Archondo said Ted Baker’s San Francisco Centre location had five female associates who were reporting an “increase in violent activity from homeless people on the streets coming in the mall.” The employees had said people also “continue to come in to our location to swipe the front table,” Archondo wrote.

No one is suggesting this is the only problem the mall was dealing with. With the advent of work-from-home, there’s just a lot less foot traffic at these locations. Fewer shoppers means less revenue. At some point it’s difficult to tell if locals aren’t going to the mall because they just aren’t going downtown often or if they aren’t going downtown often because of the conditions at the mall.

And yet, there are some hints that maybe it is the conditions that are driving this. People are still going to the mall, just not in downtown San Francisco. An hour south in more suburban San Jose the Westfield owned mall is booming:

Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose has begun to attract visitors and retail activity at levels that top the big shopping mall’s activity even prior to the outbreak of the coronavirus.

The retail center is going through a stretch where it is attracting merchants at a brisk pace, according to Sue Newsom, senior general manager with Westfield Valley Fair…

“Our foot traffic has been exceptional,” Newsom said. “We now are way beyond our pre-COVID retail sales and foot traffic.”

That story is from March. The NY Times pointed out this week that malls nationwide are seeing increases in sales.

At San Francisco Centre, sales fell 35 percent from 2019 to December 2022. In one of the group’s malls in nearby San Jose, it said, sales increased 66 percent during that same period. Sales across its 18 U.S. malls rose 23 percent.

So it’s not malls in general or even the Bay Area in general that is the problem. People are choosing not to go to this particular mall.

Imagine you live somewhere in the middle, say Redwood City or Woodside. You have a choice between going to the mall downtown or the one in San Jose. The one downtown probably sounds more exciting or would have a few years ago. But now it might mean taking the train full of drugged out homeless people or finding a place to park your car downtown where it won’t be broken into while you shop. San Jose by contrast isn’t nearly as scenic but it’s a lot less chaotic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQoRKfXrFkw