Portland Coffee Shop Closes Amid Crime Surge

A coffee shop in Portland, Oregon, joined the list of businesses fleeing the area due to increased violence in the city.

The Coava Coffee shop, which started in 2017, announced its permanent shutdown on Monday, attributing the rise of city crime to the decision. In a report by KGW, employees claimed they no longer feel safe with the rising crime rate directed towards Portland businesses.

One Coava Coffee employee stated, “People feel unsafe, and it’s pretty traumatizing,” recalling incidents like broken windows during business hours and a chair thrown at the building.

Coava Coffee posted a statement on Instagram calling the crime “not a situation we can manage.” The post detailed employees’ experiences of extreme violence such as theft, physical attacks, threats of harm, break-ins, window smashing, and repeated traumatic incidents.

A survey conducted by the small business advocacy group Bricks Need Mortar revealed that 79 percent of the 118 Portland businesses surveyed reported having been vandalized or broken into in 2022. In comparison, in 2021, only 63 percent had reported similar incidents.

Many businesses across the US are closing their locations in Democratic-run cities due to the increasing crime rate. For instance, Whole Foods cited “deteriorating street conditions around drug use and crime” in its San Francisco location, leading to its closure. Starbucks closed 16 locations, including ones in Democrat-run cities such as Seattle, Los Angeles, Portland, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. All stores were shut down because of rising crimes, and Starbucks’ executives declared that their employees need to “feel safe at work” in order to serve the area. Surprisingly, Data from the U.S. Attorney’s Office revealed that two-thirds of individuals arrested in D.C. never face criminal charges.

Walmart also fell to the same incident, shutting down four out of its eight Chicago locations due to rampant and unprofitable crimes that force other companies out of the city. During the Black Lives Matter protests in the city, Walmart temporarily shut down all its Chicago-based stores in 2020.