Another large corporation has announced plans to pull out of violent San Francisco. The announcement comes on the heels of the murder of Cash App founder Ed Lee, the near-murder of San Francisco’s former fire commissioner by a “homeless” guy with a pipe, tech company flight, the murder of a five-year-old girl, and the conflagration of a dozen government buses by so-called “homeless” crackheads for kicks and giggles.
San Francisco’s violent tendencies reflect the wishes of their woke leaders, who appear to embrace the fentanyl-fueled “homeless” who use their government checks for drugs instead of rent. There appears to be no anti-social activity that the City by the Bay leaders hasn’t welcomed with their “sanctuary” policies. Portland and Seattle have aped the same dumb ideas, with similar results.
Whole Foods now joins thousands of individuals, hundreds of businesses, and dozens of tech giants who have given up on the city that clearly doesn’t believe in societal rules and civility because it hurts peoples’ feelings or something.
Monday, the company’s flagship “Trinity” location at 8th and Market was shuttered because the Amazon-owned store couldn’t “ensure the safety of our Team Members.” All of the employees, who had been harassed by dangerous crackheads and mentally ill street people, are being transferred to other locations.
The San Francisco Standard reported that Whole Foods tried to work with its challenging circumstances but was forced to reduce its hours and close its bathrooms after finding drug paraphernalia inside.
The mid-Market Whole Foods store was one of the largest stores, at around 64,737 square feet.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed said she was trying to work with the store to stay, but Whole Foods apparently believes the body count was getting too high and the political will to clean up the streets was too low.
Board of Supervisors member Matt Dorsey said he’s calling for hiring more police and hopes that one day Whole Foods will come back. In a series of tweets, he said he was “incredibly disappointed but sadly unsurprised by the temporary closure” of the Whole Foods location.
Related: Too Late, AOC. The Anarchy You Call for Is Already Happening.
His tweet was answered by tech executive and angel investor Jason Calacanis, one of the four members of the popular All-In podcast. Calacanis asked one question of the supervisor: “have you considered arresting violent felons?”
Touché.
have you considered arresting violent felons?
— @jason (@Jason) April 10, 2023
Bob Lee’s killer hasn’t been rolled up yet.
The man who tried to kill San Francisco’s former fire commissioner surprisingly was found and arrested, but the 24-year-old’s public defender says he’ll plead self-defense because 53-year-old Don Carmignani tried to move three people camping out in front of his parent’s home and used pepper spray. Carmignani was left with a fractured skull and broken jaw. His friend told KTVU that the former fire commissioner will be “disabled for life.”
The message being sent, then, is that homeowners may not tell dangerous “homeless” people to shove off and they can’t use pepper spray to back off a dangerous person, but they can be beaten to within an inch of their lives in the name of self-defense. I believe in self-defense. Taking a pipe to the head of an older man and leaving him lying on the street somehow doesn’t sound like self-defense.
No wonder Whole Foods got the heck out of Dodge. How do you keep your employees safe if an employer can’t move out the dangerous crackheads endangering your workers and customers and the city won’t do it? Game over. As those political philosophers Blackstreet once sang, “we out, we out.” You don’t have to tell Whole Foods twice.
The Standard says the entire downtown area is suffering a “massive loss in foot traffic due to remote work.” After the draconian COVID-19 shutdowns and the popularity of remote work, “many small businesses have shuttered, while examples of extreme poverty, drug use and mental illness on the street have become more apparent.”
The fear is that San Francisco has spent its gazillions in COVID cash and is now in the red, and more than a million square feet of space have been abandoned by the likes of Meta (Facebook), Salesforce, Lyft, Airbnb, and a host of others. Indeed, the fear is that San Francisco could be in a “doom loop.”
And San Francisco’s woke leaders brought a lot of this on themselves.
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