Just one week after the decision was made to close the Union Square store, B8ta CEO Vibhu Norby announced on Twitter on Wednesday that the Hayes Valley store has now also been closed “indefinitely” because a store manager had a gun aimed at him during a robbery. .
“Our story is not exceptional,” Norby said. “I think the city will say it’s a specific problem because we have a visible shop window and high-quality merchandise, but everyone testifies to that.”
He said since his story was covered in the media, other Hayes Valley dealers have reached out to share stories about their burglary. Norby said he would not reopen the store until he saw a month without burglaries on the block.
The Union Square b8ta store closed last week because there were three mosquitoes on the street this year. “It does not matter how expensive it is,” Norby told SFGATE in January. “We can not send our employees to a store where there is even a 2% chance that they will be robbed.”
Norby began expressing his frustrations on Twitter in January to get the city’s attention. In a single thread, each incident is set out, from a video of a man breaking the glass in the Hayes Valley store to stealing items, to a man entering the store in broad daylight to talk to a Devialet speaker of $ 2,200. The thread now contains his announcement that a store manager at the Hayes Valley store had a gun drawn at him, and so he decided to close the store.
“With a heavy heart, we have decided to close our Hayes Valley SF store indefinitely and immediately,” the tweet read. “Our store manager had a gun drawn at him this afternoon and we were robbed. The team is awake but doing well. (And yes, we had private security.) ”
While Norby said he was reluctant to rent private security for the store, as it would cost 30% more than the store’s monthly rent, he chose to do so anyway after the increase in incidents in January. “I think [hiring private security] would work, “he said. Looking back, of course, it’s not because you’re not going to ask someone to aggravate the situation. ‘
B8ta has stores around the world, and Norby told SFGATE last month that the crime in San Francisco is experiencing nothing but the business elsewhere. “It’s not really happening anywhere else in the country,” he said. ‘We have 17 other stores, including three internationally. It just does not happen anywhere else. It’s just here. ”