City and Chamber welcome Peet’s with official ribbon-cutting

Who came up with this brilliant idea for ribbon cutting ceremony? Never, mind I already know the answer. Let's all celebrate the continued chain-storization of HMB! Will they be serving Popeye's chicken for ordeurves?

I hope that Mr. Raman can find a new location to open another coffee shop.

For locations, just to start we have: the Pillar Point shopping center and Red Ginger Restaurant.

In a less practical tone, wouldn't it be nice to have a coffee shop combined with a free reading room, a kind of pretty plexiglass roofed 2 story welded iron pagoda mounted on stilts (with a mud room and bicycle parking on the bottom floor, mounted on skids and moved from beach to beach with a tractor. Something inspired by the polynesian house in Miramar.

In a more practical tone, the other problem with a small business built around a single person is staffing. There is this retail business hard spot between the size of one man and the Peets level of a hired staff and a manager. In this transition area, labor costs and business risks go up rapidly

I note that Peets advertised long and hard to staff the HMB coffee shop.

The Peets store will be stuffed with merchandise and open for 10 or 12 hours every day. The new store will be paying at least 16 to 24 hours of payroll every day plus the going rate for commercial lease. So the new store will need 2, 3 or maybe 4 times the daily sales of Raman's store just to qualify as a going business.

So to go back into business with the values and modest volumes of Raman's business, he needs to look for reasonable rent and seek out a staffing solution that doesn't push him into the Peet's staffing and revenue problems.

Comment 3 by Dan Handler  on  Oct 22  at  9:22pm  •  All my comments • 

I wish the city would give ribbon cutting ceremonies to local, small businesses starting out. Why does a huge chain get the royal treatment?

FYI-I believe the LaDiDa cafe is still for sale if Raman is interested in another location in HMB

Any idea what it costs to buy a place like LaDiDa? I'm curious.

--Darin

I hope this new chain store will use recyclable merchandize to serve their drinks in unlike Jamba Juice who is still using styrofoam (despite some public protest). If you want to feel really bad about the environment and be reminded how little some people care, walk by Jamba Juice on an afterschool afternoon and notice the overflowing trash cans of non-recycled containers - all landfill. I noticed Allied Waste received a commendation on using biodiesel, but do they have a contract with HMB to recycle styrofoam if restaurants wanted to change containers? And, did San Francisoc sign an oridance outlawing styrofoam? The answers would be good to know as would switching from styrofoam cups to bring your own container, or recyclables. Hmmmm, must have had a beach clean up over the week-end.

Dana Kimsey

Dana asked "did San Francisco sign an ordinance outlawing styrofoam?"

To quote Jonathan Lundell, "Google is your friend". I did a Google search on "San Francisco" styrofoam and got good results.

Apparently the ban took effect on July 1, 2007. I didn't know that. It seems that S.F. isn't the first city to consider or do this -- in the results summary I see mention of Berkeley and Santa Monica. No surprises there...

Maybe the HMB City Council could pretend for a day to care about the environment and ban plastic bags and polystyrene (the generic name of Styrofoam)?

Maybe we could get the Board of Supervisors to do so? After all, they did ban smoking in County parks.

All that was missing was the marching band with the drum majorette.

And why shouldn't we celebrate? We now have at least 12 places to buy coffee, (at least where one might normally expect to go to get a cup), and that isn't even including the non-breakfast oriented restaurants and the gas stations that also serve it. Count 'em all up and there's gotta be at least 30.

Hi Darin,

The MLS listing shows that the asking price was $48,000. It is an expired listing but it still might be available if you are interested. If you send me your email, I will give you the details.

Carole Delmar carole@cdelmarrealestate.com

"All that was missing was the marching band with the drum majorette.

And why shouldn’t we celebrate?"

Sorry for taking the above out of context. But we shouldn't celebrate because the entire process had the end effect of terminating two independent, long-standing, and self-maintaining local businesses. Because the willingness of Peet's to move in and pay a rent that an investment entity wanted (or needed) based on stupidly overpaying for the property was a big factor, Peet's became a facilitator in the downfall of those previous businesses. This from a corporation that has tried to differentiate itself from Starbucks.

I'll bet the ceremony was attended by the usual HMB political hypocrites and fou-fou urban-mindset money-grubbers that were professing friendship for Raman only a few months earlier. Personally, I'll never buy another cup of coffee at Peet's--that one or any other Peet's for that matter.

Carl May

Carl, hey, slow down, I was being facetious.

You're probably right about the political bobble-heads always seeming to show up for a smiley-faced photo-op. I think Raman's having become a sacrificial lamb was just a bit too coincidental with New Leaf's concern with that shopping center's decades long reputation for being an energetic 'black hole'.

I agree with you. Losing two businesses like that, one of which (Raman's) was a major trademark for Half Moon Bay's uniqueness, and the other, a much needed laundromat, just to make way for another glitsy coffee shop (as if we were really struggling to figure out where to buy coffee), is a travesty.

While Mr. Shami is probably sleeping tight tonight with the belief that he made the best business decision for his client(s), that decision, nonetheless, reminds me of the attempts to flush out those "undesirable" Katrina victims from returning to their homes to make way for condos or a golf course. If Raman wasn't paying his rent, that's one thing, but pulling a Katrina number to make sure they landed the New Leaf account ................

It's not the number of coffee shops that amazes me. It's the number of Borsini Burr galleries that makes my head spin.

During a dedicated but futile attempt to "Carmeli$e" HMB over the past decade or more, it appears the real town slipped out between the fingers of city government and the Chamber of Commerce.

Carl May

Carl, there's nothing futile about it. These people ARE successfully achieving their goals; well, in their minds, anyway. And in their minds, that's all that counts. The problem is that their inflated egos have far outpaced the capabilities of our regional and national economies.

It may seem trivial to them that there are actually people living in this area who, out of necessity, have to walk to work or, God forbid, frequent a laundromat. They might choose to call Half Moon Bay their "bedroom community", but what they are really saying is that they feel snooty enough to tell all those who don't live up to their life style expectations that there's no room for them here.

So, the fruition of this "gentrification" stupidity is reliant on all the perceived riff-raff being driven out of the community that they once belonged to but, somehow, and miraculously, those displaced individuals are now expected to come back and happily clean toilets.

Brillliant! They must be destined for the White House.