Lightly fried oysters at Kam’s on Balboa | SFGate
- Free tonight? Check out the after hours party at the Conservatory of Flowers
- Board of Supervisors backs Eric Mar’s plans to keep PETCO out of the Richmond District. Not sure what this means for the Planning Commission hearing on Thursday…
- Speaking of Supervisor Eric Mar, SFWeekly said he’d be Clumsy Smurf in the new movie. On a separate note, I hope the city got some decent coin for lighting the dome up Smurf blue…
- Park Chalet on the list of best outdoor dining spots according to Open Table
- Our beloved homemade Joe’s Ice Cream is inexplicably left off the list of the city’s best scoop spots. Boo.
- Food critic Michael Bauer is glad he took in another meal at the renewed Kam’s on Balboa. Reviewer’s tip: Bypass the regular menu and order off the chef’s special menu.
that looks so good!!! I’m going.
I wonder why the snub of the venerable Joe’s Ice Cream? Two scoops of butterscotch marble please!
What a shame about Petco. I don’t think the Supes should be so involved with these kinds of business decisions. Let the market decide. The store’s been vacant for over a year. It’s creating blight on Geary. If Petco was allowed to open and nobody shopped there, they’d close. Isn’t that the American way of doing business? Or have we become like the former Soviet Union?
“If Petco was allowed to open and nobody shopped there, they’d close.” <— this, this, this, a thousand times, this!
If Petco is not approved, please join me in boycotting those independent pet shops which conspired to keep it out.
Of course I will not boycott these smaller stores. It is a very very good thing Petco was kept out. A thousand thanks to Mar and others for doing this. We do not need smaller stores being driven out of the neighborhood by predatory chains.
People say, Let the market decide. Well in the vast majority of the country the market HAS decided, and in most places cities and towns hove nothing but giant stores. Smaller mom-and-pop stores are an extreme rarity in most cities where larger stores that sell the same things exist.
I do NOT want to live in a city dominated by giant chains. It’s that simple. Thank God other people agree.
Boycotting all of the smaller pet stores. traveling across town spewing carbon emissions for my freedom of choice
Being a lover of ice cream (I make it to Joe’s twice a week on average – have tried everyone of the SF shops on the Chronicle’s list), I understand many of the choices that the Chronicle made in their test. However, I LOVE Joe’s and can’t understand how they didn’t even include them in the tasting. I can’t say their chocolate would have come out on top from taste alone, but add in the friendly service from “Mr. and Mrs. Joe” as they are known to my kids, and you have a winning combination.
Sam, Sam Foster, Jommy Cross, and Bruce, I would love to take all of you out for a beer. You’re my people. Let the market decide what should stay and what should go. The board of supervisors should have no say in a business that’s zoned for the area what should and should not be there.
A good example of this comes by way of Reno, NV. I remember when Borders and Barnes and Noble moved in. People said the independent Sundance Books would be put out of business. The funny thing is, Sundance is thriving by changing their market slightly, focusing more on Nevada authors and areas of interest to the Great Basin. They do a great job and just moved to a larger location even with Amazon and B&N as competition. You don’t know what will happen when a business moves in but you know exactly what happens when a business is not allowed to move in.
The decision by the Board of Supes (OUR reps) is the correct one – the one that is most healthy for the future of the Richmond District. I think the critics of it should read the book, Life, Inc, by Douglas Rushkoff. One of the pts he makes is that corporations do not have human values – they have ONE AND ONLY ONE purpose: to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. THAT’S IT – nothing else.
That is why US-based corps outsourced manufacturing to China even though this is NOT in the longterm national security interests of the US (in many ways, not just the direct military one). And these were presumably strongly patriotic Americans making these decisions.
But since these patriotic Americans had to put the interests of the corp’s shareholders first (specifically making them as much $ as possible), they decided to take an action that has a strong possibility of resulting in America’s defeat if America ever came to war with China. And this was done by not just a minority of corps, it was done by almost every manufacturing corp because every corp acts like a robotic machine who is programmed to do one thing only: make as much $ for their shareholders.
Corporations – being programmed like robotic machines – do not have any interest in the local community where they’re located, or the state they’re located, or the country they’re located. That’s not what they’re made for. They were made for one and only one reason: maximize profit for shareholders.
In the same way, PETCO – being a corporation whose purpose is one thing only (make as much $ for its shareholders) – does not care about the longterm interests of the RD. They will act in the longterm interests of the RD ONLY IF such action maximizes shareholders’ profits.
Most of those shareholders presumably do not live in the RD and thus have no emotional ties to the RD like a local business owner does where he or she lives in the neighborhood, where his or her kids go to the local school, where the owner must live with the consequences of what his business does to the area, where he or she can support other local businesses in his or her purchases (business and non-business) to create a strong network of local thriving businesses and a strong local economy.
People, just read the book Life, Inc, to realize why Sup. Mar should be thanked for this decision (and after thanking him, DO TELL HIM to keep OUR 7 acre soccer fields in historic GG Park grass and NOT artificial turf that’s “planted” in ground-up petroleum-based tires (that has to be changed every 8 years!!!). He will make an important vote on that in the next 6 months.) Here’s his email address: Eric.L.Mar@sfgov.org
(And buy Life, Inc from Green Apple – support your local bookstore – they have it for only $15 and the knowledge you’ll gain from it is worth many many times that.)
@Bill – you’re implying that these local chains are selling American-made goods, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re primarily selling identical food and toys that PetCo would be selling (in fact, that was one of the points that many folks have brought up – anything that you could get at PetCo the local chains will order for you), most of which is made in China.
@ Chris – I didn’t imply that at all. You apparently missed or chose to ignore everything I said. I think you should reread what I wrote. I’ll repeat it again briefly. A corporation is not interested in the welfare of the Richmond District (RD) while a local owner is very much interested (such as in the ways I listed).
A corporation does not care about the RD because a corp is for the benefit of its shareholders, who have no concern for the RD. A corporation is a man-made robotic-like entity that follows one and only one (computer-like) program: make as much $ as possible and in doing so, give NO CONSIDERATION to the effects on the local, state, or national economy or the local schools or the local environment UNLESS it results in a greater profit IMMEDIATELY.
A local owner, having DIFFERENT priorities, follows a MUCH DIFFERENT program. He or she ACTS according to a HUMAN program in that he or she wants a safe, thriving RD with a good economy, good schools, good transportation, good environment, etc, none of which any corporation (such as PETCO) is interested in.
And ultimately a corp EXTRACTS money (net profits) from the Richmond District (thus making the RD economy poorer by taking money from the RD economy) while a local owner is GOOD for the RD economy because he / she puts some of his or her profits back into the RD’s economy so that members of the RD economy BENEFIT.
The fact that SOME of the local owner’s purchases are of items not made locally (because for example they are only made in China) does not change any of the facts I listed the above.
The landlord of the buiiding where the PETCO wants to go in may want a corp there because he or she may get a bigger rent check each month but all others in the RD should not want a corp there (which is what PETCO is) because the local economy will suffer for the two reasons I stated (and ultimately everyone suffers except possibly the landord).
Cities where every business is a big corp are ultimately poor cities because they are populated by corporate entities that are ALWAYS EXTRACTING money from those cities. There’s no way for VALUE and WEALTH to grow there because it IMMEDIATELY gets REDIRECTED to shareholders – none of which live there (or very few).
You seem to be assuming that PetCo is a publicly owned corporation, when it’s not. It’s owned by two private capital groups, who both manage substantial sums of money from CalPERS, the pension system for most state and local employees, of which there are hundreds in the Richmond District.
Let’s do a simple exercise. Most large retailers like PetCo manage net profits of 3-4% of gross sales (impossible to know for sure with PetCo, since it’s a private company, but PetSmart is around 4%). We’ll assume 4%. PetSmart stores average about $4 million in sales per year, let’s round that up to $5 million for this store. So we’re looking at $200,000 in net profit that is potentially leaving the Richmond District and being distributed to its owners. The wages of the store manager and employees are obviously paid out locally.
Median household income in SF is just over $65,000, so we’ve essentially “lost” the equivalent of three households worth of income in the deal. Just for comparison, Visa, a pretty decent-sized SF-based company (though not the largest, by any means), managed to bring back $3 billion in profits to SF this year, or the equivalent of 46,154 households worth of income. Zynga, a company which didn’t even exist five years ago, is set to bring back more than $100 million in profit this year, in addition to now employing more than 2,000 people in SF (amount of payroll paid locally is really a better way of measuring how much impact a company has on a city). Are you still seriously going to argue that SF is a relatively rich city because of more local neighborhood retail? That’s laughable.
There are many reasons to support neighborhood retail over chains – it contributes to a sense of place, it helps build a community, it can simply be fun to know who is selling to you, etc. However, there is no feasible financial reason, from a city’s financial health perspective, to try to block corporate chains. Santa Clara County is overrun with corporate chain stores, yet is one of the richest places on the planet. Detroit has hardly any chain stores within its city limits, yet is obviously not a healthy city.
As I’ve said before, I’d be fine with blocking ALL chains or blocking none. But this ad-hoc situation where we decide to block some and not others based on some notion of financial “health” is absurd.