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Barry Parr
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Everything was 50% off for the last weekend at Coastside Sports.
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Barry Parr
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Many of the shelves were empty by Sunday afternoon.
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Barry Parr
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Owner Lisa Garcia is relieved to focus on the graphic design firm she owns with her husband.
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Everything was 50 percent off at Coastside Sports yesterday. It was also their last day of business.
I stopped by an hour before closing, unhappy to see the loss of another business serving Coastsiders. Owner Lisa Garcia looked happier than I did. She and her husband Robert will have more time to focus on their design firm Harvey + Garcia Graphic Design. The design business is doing well now that the economy is picking up. “It’s great to have a real life and see the kids,” she added. The Garcias will continue to operate their online store.
Lisa attributed the store’s problems to a combination of the small population of the Coastside, and their own inability to compete with the vast selections and low prices at big box retailers over the hill.
“There were some people that didn’t care as much about price and would shop on the coast no matter what,” said Garcia. All I know is that when my son was in Little League, they gave me the kind of help that I’ve come to expect from local businesses. But the writing was literally on the wall. The “For Lease” signs went up weeks ago. Understandably, Robert Garcia declined to talk to me when I called after seeing the signs.
When I entered the store, on their last hour of business, they took one look at my notebook and camera and asked, “Are you from the Review?” No one from the Review had come by in their final days. “I think it’s because we never advertised with them very much,” said Garcia. “They did do a story about us when we opened.”
“I didn’t hear about it till Friday,” wrote Clay Lambert, Managing Editor of the Review, in response to an emailed question about why the Review hadn’t written about the closing.
I hope we see something from the Review on Wednesday. We need a conversation about how to make the Coastside economy work for locals as well as daytrippers for Burlingame, and to do it in a way that supports our downtown areas instead of strip malls and KFC’s on the highway.
