The Cinemark Movie Theater chain has announced that it will be permanently shutting down its Downtown San Francisco Centre location this Friday, as San Francisco continues its death spiral of shuttered businesses proliferating across the city.
This week, shopping center giant Westfield announced that it will be closing its once booming shopping mall located just south of the city’s famed Chinatown and Nob Hill neighborhoods due to the troubling “dynamics of the downtown” area, a not-so-subtle hint at the city’s soaring crime rate and subsequent loss of foot traffic and tourists.
Only two days later, Cinemark made an announcement of its own and told customers that it will be shuttering its theater in the mall, with its last showings happening on Thursday, according to the San Francisco Standard.
The paper added that Cinemark said it was closing the location after a “comprehensive review of local business conditions.”
The Standard also noted that the theater is accessible via a bank of elevators in the mall concourse, and the lifts had often been found smeared with human waste.
Cinemark is hardly alone. More than half the stores and eateries in the mall have closed since 2020.
The Standard included a list of more than 20 major retail chains that have closed their doors since 2020, including the Gap, the Disney Store, Amazon, Office Depot, Nordstrom, Old Navy, and many more.
San Francisco’s retail decline has been far worse than the general decline forced on retailers by the response to the coronavirus, especially as the City By The Bay has been hit with the trend of businesses allowing employees to work from home and a massive population decline as people flee the failing city for other regions. With these pressures, San Francisco’s recovery was one of the slowest in the nation.
Watch — “FOR LEASE”: Closed, Vacant Businesses Line San Francisco Street as Retailers Flee
Tiny-Remove-3734 / LOCAL NEWS X /TMX
But San Francisco has also suffered from a skyrocketing crime rate, a rise in homeless people, and open-air drug abuse. On top of all that, the city was best by waves of “mass looting” in 2021 during the many BLM riots.
Politics has also been a major source of trouble for the city. Liberals try to claim that San Francisco’s soft-on-crime policies have not led to the retail exodus, but shoplifting has led to the closing of a growing number of stores, and some employees of downtown retailers fear coming to work.
Watch: Brazen Shoplifting Activity in San Fran Continues…
Lyanne Melendez
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston