The owner of San Francisco’s historic luxury department store is holding the feet of elected officials to the fire over the city’s deteriorating conditions, leveling a threat to move his business elsewhere if nothing changes.
For over 165 years, Gump’s was a popular stop for shoppers who visit the City by the Bay. But in a full-page ad in The San Francisco Chronicle, its CEO John Chachas called out top Democrats California Gov. Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London Breed and the city’s Board of Supervisors, suggesting the upcoming holiday season may be its last.
“San Francisco now suffers from a ‘tyranny of the minority’ —behavior and actions of the few that jeopardize the livelihood of the many,” Chachas wrote in the open letter that ran in the paper last week. “The ramifications of COVID policies advising people to abandon their offices are only beginning to be understood. Equally devastating have been a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets.”
“Such abject disregard for civilized conduct makes San Francisco unlivable for its residents, unsafe for our employees, and unwelcoming to visitors from around the world,” he told the elected officials.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Chachas said there wasn’t a specific boiling point that led him to penning the open letter but had accumulated over “many, many months” was the lack of public sentiment that was not drawing attention to how elected officials “seemed incapable of coming to grips with some fairly basic realities.”
“I have a wonderful company with wonderful people who are deeply committed to it. And we live in a city that’s not functioning and it’s getting worse and worse and worse,” Chachas said. “And Governor Newsom and Mayor Breed and the city supervisors seem either incapable of understanding it or unwilling to actually make the policy changes that are needed to make it a workable environment.”
“It’s sort of lunacy to live in an environment where you go to work every day or people go to work and customers can’t come to your store. I mean. That’s not a normal operating environment,” he added.
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Chachas attested to first-hand accounts of Gump’s most loyal customers, some who’ve shopped there for over 50 years who are refusing to walk in due to the current conditions in San Francisco.
“When we don’t see them, we actually call them to find out, ‘Gee, hey Mrs. Jones… you haven’t seen us in two years. Can we do anything?’ And we have the commentary that’s just consistent, which is ‘We love your store, we love the products that you offer. I’ll buy something online, but I’m not stepping foot in that city.’ That’s what we hear. That is the rejoinder,” Chachas told Fox News Digital.
He largely blamed the origins of San Francisco’s self-destruction on COVID-era policies that deterred people from going to work in the city even in 2023, stressing it cannot survive on “three-day work weeks.”
“You have 25 million square feet of empty office space in San Francisco. I keep waiting for the governor to come out with a plan to induce people back to their offices, which is what every governor in the country should be doing, it’s what the federal government should be doing, what every state government should be doing,” Chachas said. “And instead, everybody just keeps talking about it in veiled terms like it’s somehow not an issue. It is a gigantic issue for businesses. Gigantic.”
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Chachas offered solutions that could revive San Francisco, urging Newsom to offer tax incentives for businesses that require employees to work in-person five days a week and calling for city officials to enforce ordinances that are already on the books and doubling police presence, saying it’s “basic stuff” but compared the direction the city is headed to “Gotham” of Batman fame.
“This isn’t a mystery. It’s not complicated. You can be a rhesus monkey and actually look at the facts and know exactly what people have done,” the CEO said.
When buying the full-page ad, Chachas told Fox News Digital he was not hesitant to call out Newsom and Breed by name.
“They’re responsible. She’s the second highest paid mayor in the United States. He’s a high-paid governor of one of the most important states in the United States. They have responsibility for the cities in which they serve. If they don’t want the responsibility, they should resign, find a different job,” Chachas said.
While he hasn’t had direct interaction with Newsom or Breed, Chachas said he’s happy to talk with them, insisting he can be reached easily, though he doesn’t expect to hear from them.
Chachas told shared he’s “optimistic in nature” but while he’s hoping for the best, he’s “planning for the worst” by looking at other cities to relocate Gump’s. He suggested Salt Lake City, which is the home of the retailer’s warehouse and fulfillment center, is a leading contender.
“I can assure you, Salt Lake City doesn’t have these kinds of problems,” Chachas said. “Now, they’ll say ‘Salt Lake City doesn’t have a homeless issue.’ Sure it does. It’s just that it manages it differently. It manages the problem differently.”
Chachas’ political outspokenness comes naturally as he himself once threw his hat in the ring when running in the Nevada GOP Senate primary in 2010 (he lost to former Nevada assembly member Sharron Angle, who went on to lose to Democrat incumbent Harry Reid).
He’s the first to acknowledge that he wasn’t a “very good candidate” and he chuckled when asked whether he would ever run for office again, though he did offer the San Francisco mayor a challenge.
“I would probably swap jobs with Mayor Breed for 180 days,” Chachas said. “I’ll let her run Gump’s for 180 days. She can let me run the city for 180 days, and we’ll see how we do. I’ll take a dollar as my salary. I doubt anybody’s going to take me up on that, but that would be kind of interesting… You’d see a lot of change in 180 days, I can tell you that.”
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As someone who splits his time between New York City and Park City, Utah, Chachas is calling for a comprehensive review of COVID policies and what had been implemented in cities across blue and red states in the form of a bipartisan commission, especially since COVID won’t be “the last virus we face” and such policies have had long-term ramifications for cities like San Francisco.
“Anybody that today looks at significant cities like San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Minneapolis, who were very, very vigilant about ‘Don’t go to the office, that will be terrible.’ The implications of those policies have been nothing short of devastating to business. I mean, devastating,” Chachas said. “And we’ve sort of danced around the edge of that issue. It needs to be addressed. It needs to be addressed. And this is much bigger than Gump’s. It’s much bigger than San Francisco. It’s kind of a national question about occupancy and real estate and businesses. But it’s a big deal.”
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He continued, “We never had a virus like this, but we’re going to have another one at some point and someone better actually take advantage of all this data and learn something and not just stick your head in the sand… The politicization of this whole topic is really problematic, because if you went back, and you looked at the data… There’s a lot of data that the states that kept closed and kept people away from their offices are much, much more slow to come out the other side of this. And in fact, I think that is what we’re feeling in San Francisco.”
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