On a recent weekday afternoon, San Francisco Centre was silent, save for footsteps and the low din of mall muzak. That day, it was Maroon 5 and “Fight Song.” Stores were boarded up. The Bloomingdale’s flagship, with all of its going out of business sale signage, had the air of an outlet mall fire sale. It was a shell of its once luxurious glory.
It’s not news, really, that San Francisco Centre is struggling. The myriad challenges of downtown San Francisco and the broader shifts in malls globally have been a one-two punch for the longtime mall. The former Westfield mall, valued last year at $1 billion less than its 2016 rate, is the clearest distillation of the struggles the city faces downtown. But in recent weeks and months, the mall feels well and truly barren. It’s a tough look especially as the (repeatedly delayed) auction to sell the property is scheduled for Thursday.
“It’s gotten worse,” a longtime retail worker told Gazetteer SF, when asked about foot traffic in recent weeks. “There’s a lot more stores that closed recently.”
Longtime mall fixtures like Auntie Anne’s have abandoned ship. New shops that looked to be bright spots in the mall, like Sucka Flea Marketplace or the curated shops +Friends and Merkado, have vacated the mall after their short-term leases ran out. Smaller businesses that don’t have the cachet or resourcing of a global brand are the hardest hit, but even the international chains seem to have slowed down.
“A bunch of businesses are just waiting for our leases to time out,” one shop manager, who, like the other workers, spoke on the condition of anonymity, admitted. “It’s empty-empty.”
A lot of them, they said, were waiting to see what Bloomingdale’s would do last year. Its departure from the mall earlier this year leaves the mall without an anchor tenant. (A Bloomingdale’s worker declined to speak with Gazetteer.)
The stores that have not yet vacated the mall are still cutting back, either reducing their hours or closing their doors and seemingly riding their leases out. CHALO & Co., the locally-themed tchotchke shop, still has its merchandise and fixtures in the shop — but a sign says that they are closed “until further notice.” (A phone number connected to CHALO & Co. went unanswered.)
“A lot of the stores can't get out of their leases but it would be better overall for them to close,” one young worker speculated. “They’re not spending on things that they’re not really able to.”
The manager said that JLL and Trident Pacific, the building’s management, have kept in touch, but that they’ve heard little in terms of what the future of the mall will truly hold. (Representatives for JLL and Trident Pacific did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gazetteer.) The businesses that remain at the mall — the familiar mall brands, the food court shops, and the more high-end establishments — are left to weather the storm. There’s a bit of a defeated feeling, as every glimmer of hope sinks into the reality that the mall might just be too far gone. Slight upticks in attendance with return to office or conferences at Moscone Center have not significantly altered the mall’s reputation.
“People are just deterred from coming to the mall because they think it's closed,” the young retail worker said.
