Whole Foods on Monday shut down its ritzy new flagship store in San Francisco, after just a year in operation, citing crime and safety concerns.

I wrote about that astonishing event yesterday, brought on by the city's failure to enforce its own laws, noting that the company had a good customer base and had shelled out big to make the place attractive, but that was no match for the chaos the one-party government had allowed the area to fall into.  Whole Foods may have had a punchbowl for itself and its customers, but with the city's coddling of bums and criminals, someone dropped a deuce in it.

In this case, seems that was literally.  The story seems to have set San Francisco's locals buzzing on the internet, with person after person giving his story about what he saw in that place as it happened.

I curated a few doozies describing how bad it was:

Whole Foods San Francisco at SOMA 4th St. This is what employees have to deal with daily in S.F. People high on drugs, in psychosis. Suspect ate lot of fruit in store, his basket was full of orange/banana/tangerine peels. Look at security, hiding behind that brave woman employee pic.twitter.com/FU25XYhWcU

— Old Fashioned SF (@powellmarket415) April 11, 2023

This picture appears to be from the Whole Foods nearest to the Whole Foods that was shuttered, slightly up the road at Powell and Market.  The point is clear, though.

From local publication SFist:

The block of Market Street between Seventh and Eighth streets has been notably more chaotic since the pandemic, with a crowds typically congregating closer to the Seventh Street end, and plenty of open-air drug use and dealing going on.

The Whole Foods announced in November that it was instituting a rule for using its restrooms, which would require showing a receipt to a security guard to prove you had shopped there. Around that same time, the store cut back its hours and began closing two hours earlier, at 7 p.m., out of safety concerns for its employees.

And from the comments section at SFist, the actual experiences of the locals:

Had enough? Obviously, the bums were taking over, or, as another commentator noted, Whole Foods had become "a food bank for the druggies and homeless."  Another said it was "never a good sign to see your grocery store filled with cops and security."

Fox News commentator Geraldo Rivera noted that what went on in that store and throughout the crumbling city amounted to an utter rejection of civilization. 

You would never see brazen thieves in previous years ... it's shameless going in five, 10, 15 of them roughing up innocent storekeepers, but stealing stuff in a way — I mean, there was always shoplifting in this and that. But the fact that they just reject the rules utterly of civilization. 

Every now and then, Geraldo gets one right.  Who would want to shop at such a place, particularly for food? 

When the bums are allowed in repeatedly, bringing in sanitation issues with them, and can make drug-addled spectacles of themselves, customers go other places.  That's why Whole Foods just shut the place down.

Image: Twitter screen shot.