San Francisco - Retail & Industry

After nearly four years in the neighborhood, Castro floral art studio Blumen (548 Castro St.) will close at the end of the month.

The Castro's Levi's Store at 525 Castro Street (between 18th and 19th streets) has quietly closed after 14 years in the neighborhood.

The new Whole Foods near Civic Center will be the largest Whole Foods in San Francisco, and will open March 10 to bring a much-needed boost to a corner that has lately been in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Some 200 yards from the Great Highway, a cannabis dispensary is coming to what is currently Black Bird Bookstore. Meanwhile, Black Bird is just moving just a couple blocks up the street.

Van Cleef & Arpels — a centuries-old jewelry chain founded in Paris — and the luxury fashion company Chanel recently acquired new retail store locations in Union Square that are set to debut this year, each real estate investment existing as a sign that downtown SF is rebounding.

For the company’s 170th anniversary, Ghirardelli Square is renovating its chocolate shop and ice cream parlor, plus adding a new pop-up shop.

The latest retail casualty in the ongoing shutter parade around Union Square — and in the ongoing retail decline nationwide — is the Market Street/Westfield Mall location of Abercrombie & Fitch.

The new owner of the Pacific Heights True Value Hardware made an unusual discovery when he took over — a 50-foot avocado tree that’s pummeling the shop’s backyard with the delicious fruit.

The Castro's newest cannabis retail store, Flore Store (258 Noe), is now open while historic neighborhood restaurant Flore (formerly Cafe Flore) has remained shuttered for two years.

A new cannabis retail shop has been proposed at 2057 Market St., formerly Market Nail Spa.

Amber Senter helped create cannabis social equity policies in the Bay Area and the state of California, and now she's part of the team that just won Planning Commission approval for a new Bayview dispensary.

A trendy, midcentury-style furniture company from Southern California has just leased a choice piece of retail real estate at the corner of Chestnut and Fillmore streets in the Marina.

The SF Planning Commission unanimously approved a new dispensary called Solful, coming to the corner of Irving Street and 10th Avenue.

The great Walgreens closures are underway, and signs in the stores claim “90% Off” sales, but the shelves are nearly 100% empty and draped in caution tape.

The big empty Macy’s won't be an empty Macy’s anymore, as the long-promised Stonestown Galleria Whole Foods Market says it’s “Opening in December.”

Rare Device, the housewares and gift store and art gallery at 600 Divisadero, is opening up a spinoff plant shop across the street later this week called Plant House by Rare Device (505 Divisadero). 

A designer consignment shop moves home, Safeway changes its hours once again to combat shoplifting, and a new chiropractor and dog grooming business are on the way.

An erroneous claim that Target is closing its downtown San Francisco Metreon location was picked up by conservative media, but shot down by a simple email from a Chronicle reporter who asked the company.

After 14 years in the Castro, Daddy's Barbershop has permanently closed citing impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In an attempt to halt the closure of laundromats — and the removal of in-unit laundry machines — the Planning Commission just passed a set of laundromat protections.

Five more Walgreens locations are biting the dust across the city, and corporate headquarters is claiming it’s because of “organized retail crime.”

What had been a CBD “wellness boutique” on Cortland Avenue will now be a full-blown cannabis dispensary with a “women-focused business model,” Mary Modern.

SF’s third-oldest dispensary will finally be allowed to reopen in Crocker-Amazon, after surviving an appeal from a neighboring church.

In this edition: a Castro nightclub appears closer to reopening, a new hair removal salon has been proposed, an unnamed coffee shop fills a long-vacant space, and another coffee shop opens while one remains temporarily closed.

The Union Furniture Company went out of business in the 1970s and its vintage sign has become an eyesore, but an incoming cannabis dispensary won approval to restore it.