A Whole Foods flagship store in San Francisco has temporarily closed just one year after opening, with company officials citing rampant crime in the area as the primary cause.
The enormous location at Trinity Place in the city’s Mid-Market neighborhood locked up Monday night, but instead of reopening Tuesday morning, the doors to the store remained closed.
“To ensure the safety of our Team Members, we have made the difficult decision to close the Trinity store for the time being,” Whole Foods said in a statement obtained by USA Today. “All Team Members will be transferred to one of our nearby locations.”
A website for the store has also been scrubbed from the internet.
In March 2022, the massive Whole Foods location, designed with “nods to classic San Francisco,” opened downtown, peddling some 3,700 products to its shoppers.
“Our neighborhood waited a long time for this supermarket, but we’re also well aware of problems they’ve experienced with drug-related retail theft, adjacent drug markets, and the many safety issues related to them,” Dorsey wrote.
San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Matt Dorsey said on Twitter that he was “incredibly disappointed but sadly unsurprised” by the closure.
The announcement also comes after the recent stabbing death of Bob Lee, the co-founder of Cash App and chief product officer of MobileCoin — a San Francisco-based cryptocurrency company. Surveillance video of the attack shows Lee clutching his side and attempting to drag himself to safety, leaving a long trail of blood behind.
He died from his wounds shortly after the April 4 attack in San Francisco’s Rincon Hill neighborhood.
Just days later, former San Francisco fire commissioner Don Carmignani was attacked with a metal pipe in the city’s Marina district. He was seriously injured in the confrontation, but is expected to survive.
The pair of high-profile attacks have stoked concern among residents in San Francisco, where burglary and thefts are also becoming more prevalent.
While violent crime statistics in San Francisco have remained fairly consistent in recent years, preliminary police data shows 12 homicides this year so far, an increase of 20% compared to the same period in the previous year.