The new City Target at Geary and Masonic is
opening to the public today, although the official Grand Opening or whatever is Sunday. Not gonna lie, The Wife and Baby Beyonce will be there today, because the kid needs diapers and some other shit and The Wife was already planning the 30-minute drive to the Target at Serramonte. Now it's a 4-minute drive to the new store.
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| Photo stolen from SFGate |
Naturally, I'm sorta conflicted about the whole thing. On the one hand, San Francisco is currently engaged in some
bitter struggles about
chain stores moving in. And I kinda agree with that! I don't want to see San Francisco turn into Everytown, where everything's a chain store and anyplace is indistinguishable from anyplace else. If you got blindfolded and dropped into most cities, you would literally not be immediately able to tell if you were in Phoenix or St. Louis or Lexington except for maybe the accents and the weather because most American cities have become so homogenized. That's bad! And we don't want that here.
ON THE OTHER HAND, that Geary/Masonic shopping thing has been sad and mostly empty for years and Target will create a lot of jobs and they really do offer a lot of great products at very low prices. But it's still a chain.
It's weird, though. Target seems to get a pass from people in SF. They're not universally loathed like some other chains, although I suspect if you tried to put a City Target into, say, the
old Tower Theater on Mission, people would lose their fucking minds. I'm not sure what it is about Target that insulates them from the same shit other chains get if they try to move in. Same with Trader Joe's. We can't get enough Trader Joe's.
I don't really have any point here, except that there are a lot of questions about chain stores in SF I don't have answers to. That is a pretty lame point. Oh well.
I'm pretty okay with it. It's already a well established chain store zone (heck, it was a Sears Roebuck in 1961) and SF sorely lacks affordable places to buy mundane stuff like underwear and vacuum cleaners or whatever.
ReplyDeleteI am such a whore for Target. I think it's because they have everything and it's affordable. Oh, and, we have one right next door to my office in Oakland. I am in that Target once a week, if not more. When I walk in all the employees call out my name like I'm Norm from "Cheers."
ReplyDeleteWhat Stoney said, especially the underwear part.
ReplyDeleteI'm cool with it because the space was built for a big box store and it has been an awful eyesore for years.
ReplyDeleteBut I noticed they have a Starbucks there and I can't believe there wasn't an uproar about it.
I probably won't shop there much, but I'd rather SF people spend their money in SF instead of in SSF.
Amelia's Artisanal Apothecary doesn't have the shelf space for diapers. Except for that one brand, hand-sewn in St. George, Utah, by a small band of excommunicated celibate Mormons. And who can afford those?
ReplyDeleteThank goodness there's a place to buy underwear now. I'd perfected a method to turn plastic grocery bags into underwear but now I only have the option of paying 10 cents for paper bags and those just don't operate the same under the conditions I need.
ReplyDeletebuild a target in SF and people applaud but build a jack spade on valencia st. and the natives go nuts.
ReplyDeletei'm not against either, but its pretty hypocritical.
heck there are people who are probably upset if barney burger opens another outlet because they already have 5.
I really preferred the pop-up Mervyn's that used to be there.
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