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The bad news is that San Francisco is losing yet another flagship retailer downtown. The good news is that this time they aren’t the only ones. Macy’s announced today that it will close about 30% of its outlets nationwide which works out to about 150 stores.
Macy’s will close its flagship Union Square store, according to Supervisor Aaron Peskin, who said the company directly informed him Tuesday morning of its plans.
The move comes after the retail giant announced it will close 150 stores, about 30% of its total locations, over the next three years—including 50 by year-end—due to flagging sales…
State Sen. Scott Wiener said there is « a lot of work to do » in order to revitalize the city’s downtown.
“There will be an automatic narrative that this closure has something to do with San Francisco or with crime,” Wiener said. “But this is a mass closure. … We need to aggressively and creatively reimagine the future of downtown SF, including Union Square.”
Sen. Wiener is always quick to defend San Francisco’s honor but in this case he may be trying a bit too hard. The trends Macy’s is responding to with this announcement clearly aren’t limited to San Francisco, but that doesn’t mean these aren’t some of the same trends SF has been struggling with. Even the San Francisco Chronicle reports this is partly about the dying of downtown retail space in the city.
Experts say, and studies show, that in-person retail — sometimes called brick and mortar — has largely rebounded from pandemic lows.
