The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering an extraordinary policy that would allow people to report grocery stores that close too quickly.
Earlier this week, Supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would force grocery stores to provide six months’ written notice to the city before closing.
Supermarket operators should also make “good faith” efforts to ensure the continued availability of groceries in their enclosed locations, whether by finding a successor store, helping residents form a grocery cooperative, or any other plan they may devise. meeting with the inhabitants of the city and neighborhoods.
Lest anyone think this is a heavy-handed intervention by the city, the ordinance makes it clear that the owners still retain the ultimate power to close their store. It also creates a number of exemptions to the six-month notice requirement. If a store closes due to a natural disaster or business circumstances that are not “reasonably foreseeable,” it is not required to provide the full six months’ notice.
However, if stores closed without providing due notice, those affected by the closure would have the right to sue the closed store for damages.
Preston has had this ordinance in place since January, when a Safeway in the city’s Fillmore neighborhood announced it was closing before city officials stepped in to keep it open a little longer. The policy itself is decades old.
In 1984, the Board of Supervisors passed a policy identical to the one Preston and Peskin are proposing now, but it was vetoed by then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein. At the time, Feinstein described the policy as “an unnecessary intrusion of government regulatory authority.”
Preston is more comfortable with intrusion.
“It was a good idea then, and it’s even better now,” he told the Chronicle of San Francisco in January. “We need advance notice, transparency, community input and a transition plan when major neighborhood grocery stores plan to close their doors.”
Grocery store executives argued as early as the 1980s that layering a series of processes on top of store closures would make them less likely to open.
The exemptions under the ordinance would appear to give supermarkets enough leeway to comply with the law’s terms, even if they did not provide six months’ notice of closing. One wonders what compensation someone might expect by suing a store that has closed.
Whatever the impact of this proposed policy, it provides significant insight into how much micromanagement San Francisco politicians think their city needs.
You would think that grocery store owners would want to stay open as long as they are profitable and not close their businesses for trivial reasons. Likewise, you might think that residents whose regular grocery store closes would be able to find alternative places to get food fairly quickly. Competing grocery chains could decide whether to operate one store in place of another that has failed.
Preston and Peskin are not as confident in San Francisco’s ability to self-organize. Their ordinance is based on the idea that a change of any significance must be accompanied by a lengthy public process and enforced with the threat of third-party lawsuits, to prevent people from making their own decisions and doing something too reckless.
This is actually how San Francisco already treats anyone’s efforts to start anything, whether it’s a new business, a new technology, or a new home. It’s not a coincidence.
All this process and bureaucracy on the front end makes businesses harder to start and more annoying when they close.
However, if you have to get a million permits and permits to start doing something, is it really that much more ridiculous for the city to apply the same bureaucracy to something that gets shut down?