Cotopaxi Closes San Francisco Store after Multiple Break-Ins: ‘City of Chaos’
Active wear brand Cotopaxi is closing its San Francisco store because of repeated break-ins and rampant crime in the area, the founder and CEO confirmed Tuesday.
“As of today, we are closing the store due to rampant organized theft and lack of safety for our team,” Davis Smith wrote of the San Francisco location. “Our store is hit by organized theft rings several times per week. They brazenly enter the store and grab thousands of dollars of product and walk out.”
He said the outdoor-clothing company, which is considered a competitor of Patagonia, opened a retail shop a year ago in what was once known as a “charming shopping district just blocks away from the famous Full House home.” Within a week of opening, the store’s windows were smashed and thousands of dollars of merchandise were stolen, he said. After the window was replaced, violent thieves returned and broke it four more times, forcing the store to replace it with plywood pending the installation of a metal security gate.
The robbers are getting tactful at their heists, Smith added. After the store started locking the front door, only opening it for customers, the criminals would send a woman posing as a shopper to the door. Once the door was opened, hiding henchmen would ambush the store and grab product off the racks, he said.
“Our team is terrified. They feel unsafe. Security guards don’t help because these theft rings know that security guards won’t/can’t stop them. It’s impossible for a retail store to operate in these circumstances, especially when cities refuse to take any action (despite us paying taxes well above any other state we operate in),” he said.
Smith slammed the city for reducing police presence in the neighborhood, likely owing to demands from defund-the-police advocates, “despite mass-scale crime.” He recounted terrifying incidents he and his wife have experienced while visiting San Francisco, a city he “used to love” that has now deteriorated into a crime-infested wasteland. During a recent trip, Smith said crooks broke into his rental car and stole everything out of his trunk. But when he called the police, “they let us know this happens hundreds of times per day in the city and said it was our own fault for parking in the street,” he alleged.
PHOTOS: Streets of San Francisco
The local government is complicit in the crime surge too, he suggested. Progressive prosecutors in San Francisco and Los Angeles have come under fire for lax law-enforcement policies, such as bail reform, which many claim have incentivized lawlessness. Former San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, who was ousted from office in a June recall referendum, went on the record in July 2020 — at the height of the “defund the police” rhetoric in the wake of the murder of George Floyd — sympathizing with the movement. He said it had “started in critical conversations about the ways in which our country has responded to some of our most complex challenges in how we’ve used police as a one-size, fits all, one-sided response no matter whether we are dealing with an armed robbery in progress or someone having a mental health breakdown.”
In his statement, Smith uploaded pictures of the damaged exterior of the shop on Hayes street. Having grown up in Latin America, Smith said he “never felt this unsafe there.”
“It’s sad, but San Francisco appears to have descended into a city of chaos. Many streets and parks are overrun with drugs, criminals, and homelessness, and local leadership and law enforcement enable it through inaction,” he said.
