April 25, 2023 (SFChronicle.com)
When the Whole Foods Market at San Francisco’s Civic Center suddenly announced a temporary closure on April 10 due to unspecified safety concerns, national political pundits were swift in seeing this as a telltale sign of the city’s apocalyptic doomscape.
San Francisco Supervisor Matt Dorsey responded by promoting a City Charter amendment aimed at increasing Police Department staffing. “Whole Foods’ closure — together with many other safety-related challenges we’ve seen recently — is Exhibit A as to why San Francisco can no longer afford NOT to solve our police understaffing crisis,” he tweeted.
Moderate political groups TogetherSF and GrowSF, meanwhile, lamented the closure as a blow to equity and food security in the neighborhood, lambasting city officials for letting the situation get so dire.
For his part, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday that he would be focusing state military and police resources, including the California National Guard and the California Highway Patrol, on a renewed war on drugs in the neighborhood.
The narrative of shoplifting and drug use driving a chain out of the neighborhood was eerily similar to that of Walgreens last year. After a video of a person shoplifting at a store on Market Street went viral, Walgreens blamed unchecked lawlessness as the reason for many of its store closures in the city. Later, however, news leaked that the closures were primarily due to economic conditions born of the company’s rapid store expansion.
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So, what’s really going on with Whole Foods? Is the chain’s ninth location in 46 square miles really a victim of San Francisco’s liberalism? Or did the second largest corporation in the world — its parent company is Amazon — just make a poor business decision, opening a 63,737-square-foot store stocked with gourmet cheese and sustainable caviar in a neighborhood where no one can afford to shop there?
We spoke to four current Whole Foods Market workers in San Francisco who painted a more complicated picture than the corporation presented. Part of it was safety, but that reason conveniently eclipsed the corporation’s lack of investment and research into the area.
According to one person who worked at the Civic Center Whole Foods, “Sales weren’t too great for the supposed flagship store of the region: Numbers were low compared to other San Francisco stores.” (The Chronicle verified their employment and granted the worker anonymity in accordance with its anonymous sources policy.)
It’s true that this Whole Foods faced many of the city’s crises head-on, ranging from shoplifting to a person fatally overdosing in its restroom. But employees told us that the company almost certainly didn’t do its due diligence about the neighborhood before signing the lease. If it had, they claimed, it wouldn’t have made such dubious decisions, like putting the liquor section by an exit and hiring poorly trained guards who tended to escalate confrontations into violence.
“If I had to guess, I’d say that no one from global or regional took the time to walk around the neighborhood,” the former Civic Center employee said.
The issues of the neighborhood are clear to anyone who visits. It is where the neediest San Franciscans have historically gone to access social services. The pandemic only made the situation worse. If Whole Foods was relying on gentrification to supply its customer base, that clearly didn’t happen.
John McCormick, who partners with Tenderloin corner stores to offer fresh groceries, said Whole Foods Market wasn’t seen as a place that hired anyone from the community, either. Subsequently, people in the neighborhood tend to shop elsewhere, like the nonprofit Heart of the City farmer’s market, where they can make the most of CalFresh allowances, federal Women, Infants and Children nutrition grants and other food vouchers.
“In order to operate a business in the Tenderloin/Civic Center community, you’ve got to be able to open up your arms to everyone,” said Steve Pulliam, executive director of Heart of the City. He noted that the pandemic made the situation in the area more volatile, with crimes of poverty and drug use more frequent. But his market responded by calling in nonviolent security staff and focusing on the needs of the people in the area, such as distributing nearly $2 million in free produce through its CalFresh Market Match program.
The seemingly powerful narrative of a corporate victim justifying a larger police presence is worrying to many of those who live in and work in the area. McCormick fears that simply flooding the area with more police officers will harm food access in the neighborhood. Foot patrols and police who actually take the time to get to know people in the Tenderloin are helpful, he said, “but I actually think the policing strategy at Civic Center has made things more dangerous and more hot.”
Pulliam agrees.
“I don’t think they can arrest their way out of this situation,” he said, noting that he’d prefer money go toward supporting neighborhood small businesses and the farmer’s market.
The ease of a large, one-stop grocery store in mid-Market is a loss for some. But for Whole Foods’ fans, never fear — the corporation is working on a new location in the old Best Buy storefront on Geary Street and Masonic Avenue. It’s a stone’s throw from Trader Joe’s across the street and less than a mile and a half from its Haight location.
If it fails, we can already predict what the narrative will be.
Reach Nuala Bishari: nuala.bishari@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @NualaBishari. Reach Soleil Ho: soleil@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @hooleil
Written By Nuala Bishari
Nuala Bishari has reported on San Francisco for nine years. She got her start at Hoodline in 2013, before moving on to SF Examiner, and then SF Weekly. At SF Weekly she worked as both a news editor and reporter, covering everything from city hall to the courts, housing to public health. Most recently, she completed a year-long investigative journalism fellowship with ProPublica and the San Francisco Public Press, where she examined how the city struggles to move people from homelessness to housing. Raised in rural New Mexico, she loves the outdoors, and when not working can usually be found hiking around the Bay Area with her dog.
Written By Soleil Ho
Since 2019, Soleil Ho has been The Chronicle’s Restaurant Critic, spearheading Bay Area restaurant recommendations through the flagship Top Restaurants series. In 2022, they won a Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award from the James Beard Foundation.
Ho also writes features and cultural commentary, specializing in the ways that our food reflects the way we live. Their essay on pandemic fine dining domes was featured in the 2021 Best American Food Writing anthology. Ho also hosts The Chronicle’s food podcast, Extra Spicy, and has a weekly newsletter called Bite Curious.
Previously, Ho worked as a freelance food and pop culture writer, as a podcast producer on the Racist Sandwich, and as a restaurant chef. Illustration courtesy of Wendy Xu.
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