Walmart closes ALL Portland stores after historic rise in thefts

Walmart has announced it will permanently close all of its Portland locations, months after its CEO warned of a historic spike in thefts at its stores.

Locations at the Delta Park and Eastport Plaza shopping malls in north and southeast Portland will close Friday, March 24, the retail behemoth announced in a statement this week.

Walmart says they are closing the stores – which serve as a haven for low-income shoppers across the city – because they have failed to meet financial expectations.

However, the closures are the latest case of corporate relocations or business closures amid a sharp rise in crime and homelessness.

the crowd Exodus was carried out by owners fed up with the Portland’s sorry state and the officials’ subsequent failure to do so suppress both crises.

Scroll down for the video:

Locations, like this store at the Eastport Plaza mall in southeast Portland, will close on Friday, March 24, the retail behemoth announced in a statement earlier this week

The maneuver – which Messing blamed on financial troubles – came months after CEO Doug McMillon warned of a historic spike in thefts at the retail giant’s stores

The city once hailed as the “Crown Jewel of the West” for its trendy arts and food scenes has already seen A The Nike store in Portland was shut down last year for mass shoplifting, as was a popular retail outlet in the city center that has been broken into 15 times in just two months.

Portland’s current predicament has existed since the pandemic and will now deprive residents of two of the last remaining convenient and inexpensive outlets at a time of rising food costs and economic uncertainty.

In a statement to local outlet KPTV, the big department store’s leadership cited this uncertainty as the rationale behind the closure of the last two Walmarts in Portland.

“The decision to close these stores was made after a careful review of their overall performance,” a representative told the channel this week.

“We consider many factors,” the spokesperson added, citing “current and projected financial performance, location, population, customer needs and proximity to other nearby stores” when making the “difficult” decision.

Employees have the option to transfer to out-of-town locations, the representative added, though only a handful are within walking distance, with the closest being three miles away in the Happy Valley suburb.

Others in satellite cities like Gresham and Milwaukie may also be within walking distance and are about five and six miles from the closing Portland superstores, respectively.

Once hailed as the “Crown Jewel of the West” for its trendy arts and food scene, the city has been overrun by hundreds of homeless camps with tents and open drug use

Walmart’s Delta Park mall in Portland, on the opposite end of town, will also close in the next few weeks after the big department store’s decision, which came after a “careful review” of the overall performance of both stores

Only a handful of others are within ten miles of downtown, which has been overrun by hundreds of homeless camps full of tents and open drug use.

The city’s problems have become so pronounced that after nearly three years of failing to resolve livability issues, local leaders are sharing strategies to placate well-stretched businesses and residents as unrest threatens to erupt to cross the border Counties where public opinion is generally more conservative.

“Having made the decision to move forward, our focus is on our employees and their transition, which is the case here,” the Walmart spokesperson assured KPTV in his statement of the roughly 600 employees who will be working on the two stores — as well as theirs Pharmacies – are distributed. that need to be expelled.

“We are grateful to the customers who have given us the privilege of serving them at our Hayden Meadows and Eastport Plaza locations,” the representative added, as local residents have already begun to protest the decision.

Crime in Multnomah County, a more populous, more progressive region, rose 9 percent last year amid the county seat of Portland’s ongoing crime woes, prompting public safety officials in various parts of Oregon to denounce the city’s state, with the Crime was still increasing across the board for the most part

They argue that the closures will have a lasting, negative impact on low-income shoppers who are already forced to navigate Portland between the two stores, which are on opposite sides of the city.

“Safeway is the shop if I have to, but that’s triple the price I would pay here,” Amanda Pahl told KPTV this weekend outside the closing Eastport Plaza location, where she and other shoppers have expressed dislike brought.

‘What are we going to do? You have to go further, then you have to spend gas money. I might as well pay Safeway for it now.’

Local leaders are trading crime and livability-solving strategies as they threaten to spill over into adjacent counties where public opinion is generally more conservative

The Democrat-run city has one of the most deserted downtown areas in the United States as rising crime rates and homelessness scare both locals and tourists alike.

Portland currently has more than 700 homeless encampments located across the city within less than 150 square miles, and the ordeal has also led to skyrocketing crime in the area.

And some of the Pacific Northwest city’s most charming, trendiest, and priciest neighborhoods are now overrun with tent cities that crowd residential sidewalks and are littered with trash — and the problem is putting off locals and tourists alike.

The Portland City Council rushed to reimburse police last November after defunding them by more than $15 million in 2020. Officials voted to add $5.4 million to the force’s budget.

When the police were stripped of funds in 2020, the Portland Police Bureau suffered a series of retirements and layoffs.