Walmart has announced it is permanently closing all of its Portland locations, months after its CEO warned of a historic increase in theft at its stores.
The locations, located in the Delta Park and Eastport Plaza shopping centers in North and Southeast Portland, will close Friday, March 24, the retail giant revealed in a statement this week.
Walmart says they are closing the stores — which serve as a haven for low-income shoppers in the city — because they failed to meet financial expectations.
That said, the closures are the most recent example of businesses relocating or closing shop amid a marked increase in crime and homelessness.
The mass exodus has been run by owners fed up with Portland’s sad state and subsequent failure of officials to suppress both crises.
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The locations, like this store in Southeast Portland’s Eastport Plaza mall, will close Friday, March 24, the retail behemoth revealed in a statement earlier this week
The maneuver – which Brass blamed on financial woes – came months after CEO Doug McMillon warned of a historic increase in theft at the retail giant’s stores.
Once hailed as the ‘Crown Jewel of the West’ for its trendy arts and food scenes, the city has already seen a Portland Nike store closed last year due to massive shoplifting, as well as popular store in the center of the city where there were 15 burglaries in just two months.
Portland’s current predicament has persisted since the pandemic and will now deprive residents of two of the last remaining convenient and cost-effective outlets at a time of rising food costs and economic uncertainty.
In a statement to local outlet KPTV, buyer of the big box store cited such uncertainty about the reasoning behind closing the two last remaining Portland Walmarts.
“The decision to close these stores was made after a careful assessment of their overall performance,” a representative told the station this week.
“We consider many factors,” the spokesperson added, pointing to “current and projected financial performance, location, population, customer needs and proximity to other nearby stores” when making the “difficult” decision.
Workers have the option of transferring to out-of-town locations, the rep added, though only a handful are within walking distance, with the closest three miles away in the Happy Valley suburb.
Others in satellite towns like Gresham and Milwaukie may also be walkable, located about five and six miles away from Portland’s closing superstores, respectively.
Once hailed as the ‘Crown Jewel of the West’ for its trendy arts and food scenes, the city is overrun with hundreds of tented homeless camps and overt drug use
The Walmart, the Delta Park mall in Portland, on the other side of the city, will also close within weeks of the big box store’s decision, which came after a “careful assessment” of the overall performance of both stores.
Only a handful of others are within ten miles of the city center, which is overrun with hundreds of tented homeless camps and overt drug use.
The city’s woes have become so pronounced that after nearly three years of failing to resolve livability issues, local leaders are sharing strategies to appease fed-up businesses and residents as the unrest threatens to spill over into neighboring areas. areas. provinces, where public opinion is generally more conservative.
“After we decide to move forward, our focus will be on our employees and their transition, which is the case here,” Walmart spokesperson assured KPTV in his statement of the roughly 600 employees spread across the two stores — as well as the pharmacies. – who will have to be moved.
“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 residents have already begun protesting the decision.
Crime in Multnomah County, a more populous, progressive region, rose 9 percent last year amid ongoing crime problems in the county seat of Portland, leading public safety officials in several parts of Oregon to denounce the city’s state as crime across across the board is still increasing
They argue the closures will have lasting, negative impacts on low-income shoppers already forced to navigate Portland between the two stores, which sit on opposite sides of the city.
“Safeway is the go-to store if I have to, but that’s three times the price I’d spend here,” Amanda Pahl told KPTV this weekend outside the Eastport Plaza closing location, where she and other shoppers expressed their disgust.
‘What do we do? You have to go further, then you have to spend gas money. You might as well pay for it at Safeway right now.”
Local leaders share strategies for solving the crime and livability problems as they threaten to spread to neighboring counties, where public opinion is generally more conservative
The Democratic-led city has one of the most desolate boroughs in the United States, where rising crime rates and homelessness scare locals and tourists alike.
Portland currently has more than 700 homeless camps scattered throughout the city within a radius of less than 150 square miles, and the ordeal has also led to a skyrocketing crime rate in the area.
And some of the Pacific Northwest city’s most charming, trendy and expensive neighborhoods are now overrun with tent cities crowding residential sidewalks and littered with trash — and the problem is scaring away locals and tourists alike.
The Portland City Council rushed to pay back the police last November after paying them back more than $15 million in 2020. Officials voted to add $5.4 million to the police budget.
When the police department was relieved in 2020, the Portland Police Department suffered a wave of retirements and layoffs.
