B8ta Closing Another San Francisco Store After Armed Robbery
6th February 2021
ust one week after making the decision to close its Union Square store, b8ta CEO Vibhu Norby announced via Twitter on Wednesday that the Hayes Valley store is now closed “indefinitely” as well due to a store manager having a gun pointed at him during a robbery.
“Our story is not exceptional,” Norby said. “I think the city will say it’s a b8ta-specific problem because we have a visible storefront and high-value merchandise, but everybody’s witnessing this.”
He said since his story has been covered in the media, other Hayes Valley merchants have reached out to share stories of their break-ins. Norby said he won’t reopen the store until he sees a month free of break-ins on the block.
The Union Square b8ta store closed last week because there were three muggings on the street it is on this year. “It doesn’t matter how expensive it is,” Norby told SFGATE in January. “We can’t send our employees into a store where there’s even a 2% chance they get mugged.”
The basic problem with Democrats running a city is that they can’t even get right the essential job of a government, protecting the people from harm. They can’t (or won’t) protect them from riots, they can’t protect them from crazy people wandering the streets, and (appently) they can’t protect them from violent crime.
B8ta has stores around the globe, and Norby told SFGATE last month that the crime in San Francisco is unlike anything the company experiences elsewhere. “This actually doesn’t happen anywhere else in the country,” he said. “We have 17 other stores, including three internationally. This just doesn’t happen anywhere else. It’s only here.”