Vibhu Norby is the CEO of a tech-centric company, and he’s not shy about sharing his concerns about San Francisco.
You think you’ve heard this story before, what with all the tech and venture folks slagging on the city as they decamp for, say, Austin, Texas, or Miami. But this is different. Norby’s employees can’t just work from anywhere, but now they can’t work in SF either — for their safety.
Norby is head of b8ta, which has big venture backing and 20 retail shops across the country. There were three in San Francisco, but within the span of a week b8ta has shuttered two of them. On Wednesday, Norby said someone pulled a gun on the manager of the Hayes Valley shop. After months of struggling with crime and threats to employees, b8ta will close the store.
The news comes just days after the company shut down its Union Square location. “We can’t send our people to a place where there’s a high chance they will be harmed or mugged,” Norby tweeted on January 26.
When asked later Wednesday evening if b8ta is rethinking its commitment to San Francisco, where it was headquartered until last year and where, according to Norby, most of its executives still live, he replied: “For sure.”
B8ta is no neighborhood mom-and-pop shop. It moved its official HQ last year to its warehouse in, yes, Austin. Nevertheless, b8ta is very much part of a set of SF merchants that survived nearly a year of shelter-in-place yet wonder how much longer they can hold out as the economy, theft, and vandalism take a mounting toll.
According to the SF Chamber of Commerce, nearly half — 45 percent — of SF storefronts that were open before the March 2020 shelter-in-place order have shuttered temporarily or permanently. Add b8ta’s Union Square and Hayes Valley stores to that count (no decision yet whether it will keep its Mission Bay location open).
Last month, Norby posted that his SF stores deal with crime and employee harassment at “10 [times the rate of] the rest of our stores combined.”
“Most of the stores have never had a single problem,” Norby told The Frisc last week.
That said, many of b8ta’s shops are in malls. When asked whether it was fair to compare SF storefronts with more secure locations, Norby noted that even b8ta’s other on-street locations “almost never get broken into.”
The firm’s West Coast marketing manager Nick Romero said Hayes Valley shoplifting and vandalism are common, and that there have been multiple attempts at forced entry during off hours.
Midnight alerts and threats
It’s not just break-ins that are a problem. Maya Emme was the store manager until recently. She told The Frisc about getting frequent late-night alerts from b8ta’s security company, and having to drive over from her Oakland home to meet the police.
“We’ve had people with mental health problems come into the store. One employee was hit across the face, and last [month] another employee was assaulted as well. Walking to work, I’ve been threatened, called racial epithets,” said Emme, who also said someone tried to carjack her near the store last November.
On company calls, she would ask other managers for advice, and they wouldn’t know how to respond. “They don’t have to deal with stuff like this,” she added. Emme submitted her resignation late last month.
Norby and Romero, who was the store’s first manager, couldn’t say exactly how many police reports b8ta has filed for the Hayes store since the pandemic began. A records request with the SFPD did not return results by press time.
Touch and play
The whole point of b8ta is to lure customers in to play with the goods, which include tech gear like fancy speakers, gamer headsets, and smart glasses, along with watches, coffee makers, spy pens, teas, and face cleansers. Each product is accompanied by a touch-me-for-more-information tablet.
It’s got a tech-geek vibe, but also shades of a sleek cannabis lounge and Sharper Image-like eclecticism. (Upside-down toothbrush holder, anyone?) It’s what the kids these days call a “retail experience.”
Before the pandemic, the plan was paying off. Romero said b8ta’s Hayes shop tallied 2,000 visitors a day on weekends during its inaugural year, 2017.
But San Francisco isn’t such a great place for retail experiences these days. Burglaries were up an astonishing 61 percent from 2019 to 2020; the rates are even higher in some neighborhoods. Larceny, which includes shoplifting, was actually down last year 36 percent, but as University of San Francisco criminologist Kimberly Richman notes, “it makes sense with all the businesses that are closed.”
For what it’s worth, assault and robbery also decreased in 2020, according to SFPD data, continuing a multiyear trend. The favorable citywide trends are still cold comfort when it feels like you, your shop, and your employees have targets on their backs.
Pain on Hayes
With floor to ceiling windows along the entire storefront on one corner at Hayes and Laguna streets, and with those ubiquitous tablets that look like iPads (“they’re totally customized and can’t be used in any other way,” according to Romero), b8ta has been a flashier target than some of its neighbors.
It’s not alone, though. Thieves recently yanked loose the security gate of the neighborhood grocer, then hauled away the store’s ATM as if extracting a giant tooth.
Hayes Valley eyewear shop owner Lloyd Silverstein, who is working with the neighborhood association to restart a merchant group, estimates one-third of the local storefronts are shuttered. There’s another reason shoplifting could be underreported, said Silverstein: People have stopped filing reports because they “go into a black hole.”
Silverstein, whose shop Optical Underground is a fourth-generation SF family business, pointed out that the police listen to complaints and have the “best of intentions,” but with infrequent foot patrols, there’s little deterrent. “Every shoplifter knows there’s no protection,” he added. An SFPD spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
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The carousel of finger-pointing spins around. Residents and merchants say crimes go unsolved; the police say arrests don’t lead to prosecutions. But in the end, it doesn’t matter: Small businesses are fighting for survival, and every broken window can be another $1,000 or more, even if the ones in Hayes Valley and elsewhere in District 5 are eligible for some reimbursement.
Silverstein, who praised b8ta’s engagement and commitment to Hayes Valley, is upset to see the store shut down. He and others have been trying to improve the neighborhood situation. They’ve raised thousands of private dollars to wrap sidewalk trees with cheerful lights. They’ve asked private firm Green Streets to help clean the neighborhood; in November, District 5 Supervisor Dean Preston’s office found $140,000 in city funds to pay Green Streets, but three months later, the outfit still hasn’t been approved by the city bureaucracy, according to Silverstein.
He said there’s also talk of hiring private security, like merchants in the Castro have done with city grants, and Silverstein even asked the cryptocurrency mogul Chris Larsen to fund surveillance cameras, as Larsen has done elsewhere in the city. (That idea, which has raised objections from privacy advocates, also ran into bureaucratic obstacles.)
Without financial help, Silverstein can’t imagine his fellow merchants, already struggling, coughing up hundreds of dollars a month each for extra services.
Fending for themselves
Hayes Valley is at a disadvantage (with the camera plan, for example) because it hasn’t formed a special business or community district — like the ones in the Castro, Union Square, and other areas — to assess an extra tax on neighborhood property owners.
In addition, a special district can take years to pull together, said Jay Cheng of the SF Chamber of Commerce. They require a majority vote, and some owners hold more votes than others based on property sizes. It’s not a near-term solution for Hayes Valley.
Downward trends on crime citywide are cold comfort when it feels like you, your shop, and your employees have targets on their backs.
Meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors last week signaled discontent with special districts, passing a resolution urging more oversight of surveillance technology and a ban on anonymous funding. In a letter to the board, Union Square Business Improvement District executive director Karin Flood, whose group has deployed 375 cameras since 2013, questioned the board’s priorities: “Instead of more oversight, we need help and support from our elected officials and from those in our criminal justice system to keep us safe. Instead, when we are down and struggling you are asking for more oversight?”
Before b8ta on Hayes closed, staff had attached security tethers to every single product, even the $13 keychain-thingie. The store had also hired an all-day security guard, even though Romero said two weeks ago the business couldn’t afford it.
Norby tweeted last week that the extra security was “extremely unsustainable long term” and “triples [the] occupancy cost of Hayes.” Just days later, someone walked in with a gun. The extra security was no deterrent.
Before the incident, Norby said he had gotten a response from city officials and connected with other merchants. No solutions were at hand, he wrote, “but we want to be in this city. It’s our home.”
Now even that is in doubt.
Alex Lash is editor in chief of The Frisc.