In addition to news that The North Face is closing its only San Francisco store in Union Square this month, we now have word that Zara plans to close its longtime boutique on the square too.
It's another bad day for Union Square retail news, and in the wake of the bombshell about Macy's selling its property and eventually closing its San Francisco flagship, we now have word that Zara will shutter its Union Square store as well.
The Chronicle reports Thursday that Zara intends to keep its two-level store in the nearby Emporium Centre (the mall formerly known as the Westfield SF Centre), as well as its Stonestown location, but the Union Square store at 250 Post Street will close next January when the current lease expires.
As of Thursday morning, we learned that The North Face is planning to close its store at 180 Post Street on March 17.
These closures join the roughly three dozen others that have hit the Union Square area in recent years — where large-format stores that formerly housed H&M, Crate & Barrel, The Gap, Uniqlo, and Barney's all remain vacant years after they shut down.
The timeline for Macy's closing is still unknown, however the store is reportedly not closing this year and will be around for the next holiday shopping season — and the Union Square Alliance assures us that Macy's will still sponsor the big Christmas tree in the square this year, at least.
Meanwhile, closures continue to be announced inside the former Westfield mall, where major tenant Nordstrom announced its closure last spring after 35 years in that location, and where the Westfield corporation decided to walk away from its mortgage on the property.
The mall remains in receivership, and that court-ordered receiver, SoCal-based Trident Pacific, is working to beef up security and improve tenancy at the mall — rebranded last week as Emporium Centre — in order that it can be prepped for resale.
What is abundantly clear is that the era of downtown, city-center shopping, where customers flocked to major-brand department stores to shop for everything from perfume to cookware to mattresses and clothes, is pretty much over — though Macy's is betting that its Bloomingdale's brand can pull through. And, reportedly, this kind of shopping still happens in the suburbs, just not really here.
And while doomsayers have liked to stay laser-focused on the narrative that this is a uniquely San Francisco problem that you can blame on homelessness and crime, that is not the case, even if those might be hurting retail in some ways. This trend is playing out in major cities across the country — and the SF Macy's is one of 150 stores the company is closing in the next three years.
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