Lol we talking about Gumps.
This turned into a rather long response. I guess the tl;dr is that us old-timers are prone to rose-colored glasses. Cal was a disaster in sports for most of its history yet all of us hang out on this website acting like we have a right to be back in the Rose Bowl of yore any year now. It's a familiar refrain about the past of SF.
My mom used to love that store and it was an SF institution but it wasn't a viable enterprise. People used to browse but it was hella expensive and had expensive real estate in an area where normal people wouldn't really shop for that sort of merchandise. It went bankrupt multiple times. I didn't realize it was still in business so I had to look it up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gump%27s#Quote:
In 1993 Gump's was in financial trouble when the catalog company later known as Hanover Direct bought it. They reduced the product lines, holding a liquidation sale on May 24, 1993, and revived the business,[4] then in 2005 sold it to an investment group for $8.5 million.[7][8]
The company began catalog sales in the 1950s and as of May 2018, more than 75% of its sales were through the catalog or online.[9]
Gump's filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on August 3, 2018.[9] On August 10, final liquidation sales began on the retailer's official website and at its remaining storefront in San Francisco;[10] the store closed on December 23, 2018.[8] In 2019 the newest Gumps owner the Chachas family reopened Gumps in its former long time location 250 Post Street Union Square. However the Chachas closed Gumps for an indeterminate period in 2020 due to the City of San Francisco's regulations on Covid.[11] Gump's is now open Monday thru Saturday in 2022.
The new owner doesn't really have much standing to complain.
My main disagreement with 82 isn't that SF doesn't have real problems, it's just that it's not a story of strict decline. SF has had problems forever. If you read Kerouac's On The Road, he talks a about the tenderloin and damned if it didn't sound just as bad 70 years ago. Whenever you talk to someone who lived in SF a long time ago they talk about how it used to be better. But if you go drill down it's often that people have on rose-colored glasses from their youth.
I vividly remember a crazy homeless lady cussing out my 3 year old sister on Polk Street when we were kids on our way to a Mongolian BBQ place in Nob Hill. I always thought the neighborhood was filthy and crime-ridden until I was a young adult and lived close to there. Even "Polk Gulch" has improved over the last few decades.
SF downtown is nowhere near as crowded or vibrant as it used to be, and it's been a disaster for local businesses, particularly lunch crowd places. But I don't think whoever bought Gumps out of their second bankruptcy is in a position to complain - they are more opportunistic carpetbagger than long-time stakeholders in SF's business community.
There are some other businesses that I mourn the loss of - Specialties (though it went away pre pandemic) and Lee's Deli (an institution that only downtown office workers will have known). Enrico's was an institution. Sadly too few long-time businesses can survive forever based on legacy.
But I think it's 99% because of remote work, not because of anything SF did. I still go downtown somewhat frequently and think there is actually fewer homeless people than when I used to work there. There aren't really enough office workers to pandhandle from, so it sort of makes sense.
I remember one of the local newspapers did a story about a very successful "panhandler" who made enough money to afford a Porsche for his commute from SJ a few decades ago. Homeless is an age-old problem in SF.
Here's another story from 10 years ago:
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/the-city-s-panhandlers-tell-their-own-stories-4929388.phpHalf of the panhandlers they surveyed had household incomes over $50k per year. Certainly wasn't a great way to make a living and vast majority were homeless but I don't see how anyone, least of all the family that bought Gumps just 3 years ago out of bankruptcy, can pretend to be blindsided by the a big problem that has been facing SF since before Gumps first bankruptcy 30 years ago.
Westfield's loss is a big one but it's a French owned company that is more or less exiting the US entirely. One of the companies I worked for talked to them about doing some business about 5 or 6 years ago and it was well known that he US shopping mall business was on the decline. Westfield SF mall had been a standout and they took the position at the time that Class A malls were going to survive but that most class B/C/etc would die.
Online shopping is a killer for retail. I am part of the problem - I purchase virtually everything online. As a parent with young children, it's very hard for me to make time to shop in person and I've probably been to Westfield SF only 2 or 3 times with my elementary school aged kids in the last 5 years.
It's not shocking to me that we are seeing a decline.
