The Market — a luxury grocer on the ground floor of the old Twitter building — is closing Friday, and its owner is blaming everything but the kitchen sink.
“The landlord did nothing but support us, but we finally looked at what was happening, and we were losing a gazillion dollars every month and made a decision,” said The Market owner and developer Chris Foley.
Foley opened the market in 2014 at the Shorenstein-owned building. Back then, X (which had its HQ at the property) was Twitter, and the Mid-Market Tax Break had led a host of tech companies, including Uber, Dropbox, and Airbnb, to open offices in the neighborhood.
Even then, it wasn’t easy to run a retail business in the area, but sales and foot traffic gradually improved. Foley said. The Market had its best year ever in 2019.
But then came the pandemic. The city shut down, companies pulled out, businesses collapsed, and the neighborhood and the store itself were beset by increasingly visible issues of people suffering from drug addiction, homelessness, and mental illness.
“Mayor Breed allowed meth addicts and homeless to take over the streets and it didn’t seem that her administration really cared, and I’m sorry to say that,” Foley said. He also directed his ire at remote work, which hollowed out downtown office buildings.
Breed’s administration organized what it called a Drug Market Agency Coordination Center near Civic Center that was operated by city and federal agencies and meant to tamp down on drug sales and open substance use in the surrounding area.
Daily sales at The Market plummeted from $60,000 to $2,200, according to Foley. Employees and customers were regularly accosted. Foley said he heard from friends and neighbors that they stopped going to The Market because of confrontations in front of the store.
“Nobody gave a fuck,” Foley said, adding that the grocer’s hot bar was forced to close after too many people came off the street and used their hands to dig out items from the steam pans.
Add The Market to a growing list of businesses in the area that have closed in recent years, blaming the lack of foot traffic and troubled street conditions, including Huckleberry Bikes, Littlejohn’s Candies, and Whole Foods. Around 15 people work at The Market. Shorenstein declined to comment.
The Food Hall, the half dozen restaurants surrounding the grocery, will remain open.
For months last year, the neighborhood and the building above The Market were locked in a saga with Elon Musk, who purchased Twitter in 2022. (Remember: “Let that sink in”?) Musk decided to relocate the company’s headquarters to Austin.
In a sign of the times and the way real estate values have collapsed in the neighborhood, a nearby 16-story office building sold at a foreclosure auction for $6.5 million, a pittance compared with the $62 million it sold for in 2016.
Foley is working on a few projects in San Francisco, including a 20-unit condo building at 2201 Market St. in Duboce Triangle. As a developer, he says, it pays to be optimistic.
“It’s going to get better,” Foley said. “San Francisco still has Silicon Valley, Tahoe, Santa Cruz, the Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge. But it’s going to take a while, especially for Mid-Market.”