Retailers can't get enough of leaving their hearts in San Francisco, or at least just leaving. Everybody from higher-end retailers like Nordstrom and Saks Off 5th, to global brands Uniqlo, Gap, and H&M, to corner Walgreens and CVS outlets have called it quits on The City That Knows How to Make Everything Worse.
But the one thing residents could always count on was the presence of local grocery stores. While it might be worth driving all the way up to San Rafael to hit a big sale at the Nordstrom location they didn't close, the corner grocer is still the corner grocer.
It's called the Grocery Protection Act and, if you were looking for a way to make sure San Francisco's poorer neighborhoods were protected from the scourge of grocery shopping, this would be the way to do it. San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Dean Preston introduced the proposed ordinance last week that would require grocery stores to provide six months' notice to the city before closing — among other strands of entangling red tape.
"Our communities need notice, an opportunity to be heard, and a transition plan when major neighborhood grocery stores plan to shut their doors," Preston said in a press release.
Fox News reported that Preston's proposal has exemptions — isn't that nice? — for "circumstances that weren't reasonably foreseeable at the time notice would've been required, or if the closure was due to a natural disaster or emergency." But even then, "stores relying on those exceptions would still be required to give as much notice as is practical before closing and also provide an explanation for having reduced the notice period."
There's more:
The bill would also require that grocery stores "meet and work in good faith with neighborhood residents" and the OEWD to find a workable solution to keep groceries available at the location. Those solutions could include identifying strategies and resources to allow the store to remain open, helping residents organize and open a cooperative and identifying another grocery store operator to take over and continue grocery sales at the location.
I'm getting a headache just thinking about trying to close a grocery store in San Francisco, and I don't even own one.
It's an idea so bad that in 1984, then-mayor Dianne Feinstein vetoed a similar measure.
Preston claims that "the food security needs of our seniors and families cannot be left to unilateral backroom decisions by massive corporate entities," but in reality, it's the little stores that will suffer the most.
When I lived in the city, there was a tiny family-owned liquor/grocery store on the ground floor of my crappy Tenderloin apartment building. The food wasn't cheap and the selection wasn't great, but it was right there, unlike the Safeway a mile up Geary, and didn't require a bus ride to get to and from. Places like that don't make much money and can't afford to get jerked around for six months — much less deal with all the other red tape in Preston's idiotic proposal.
If I'm the guy running that store, I'm thinking hard — even before the Board of Supervisors votes on the GPA — about ditching the grocery items and selling nothing but liquor and beer.
And so is every other mom-and-pop liquor & grocery store in San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods.
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