RIP Franchises of our youths

[Drunk Monk]

San Francisco's beloved Cole Hardware to close downtown location
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Sam Mauhay-Moore, SFGATE
May 24, 2023
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Cole Hardware is closing its Ninth Street location by the end of this month. 
Screen shot via Google Maps
Cole Hardware is closing its South of Market location on Ninth Street, adding to the growing list of downtown San Francisco's newly shuttered storefronts. 


The store at 345 Ninth St. will stay open until May 31, Chief Financial Officer Rick Karp confirmed to SFGATE. 
“The pandemic came, and it basically went downhill from there, like most other businesses around. And it really hasn’t recovered,” Karp said. 
The company's other San Francisco locations have seen a stronger recovery, as they are in areas with larger residential populations and see a higher volume of foot traffic, Karp added. But business at the Ninth Street store, which opened in 2017, never stopped declining. 
“Even to this day, we keep losing what we call footsteps into the front door. There are less and less people shopping, and it just is financially unbearable. We can’t afford to keep it open,” Karp said. 
Karp added that part of this decline has to do with the rise of online shopping in recent years. 
“San Francisco residents need to be trying to rid themselves of their Amazon habit. Amazon is killing retail across the city,” Karp said. 
Cole Hardware's other downtown location, at 70 Fourth St., lost 60% of its business during the pandemic but has since been inching back at about 10% each year, Karp said. He hopes that in a few years' time, business there will be back to what it was in 2019. 
The closure necessitated two layoffs, but most employees will be transferred to other stores. The company will keep the 345 Ninth St. store as a storage space until its lease is up in three years — after that, Karp said, it's hard to say. 
Cole Hardware opened its first location in Cole Valley in the 1920s and has since grown to serve the San Francisco neighborhoods of North Beach, Russian Hill and downtown, as well as Rockridge in Oakland.  

I remember making the occasional run to here when working at that long lost mythical land of AFS. I always enjoyed how densely packed the shelves were in that claustrophobic SF downtown way. A delightful place to peruse but a terrible place to be when the big quake comes. I've thought about popping in whenever I'm nearby, just for old times sake, but invariably I'm too busy on some mission (off Mission).