Continuity of a family-owned business is a remarkable achievement in the ever-changing landscape of the retail world. A small business must learn to adapt not only to their immediate surroundings as it changes and grows through the generations but also accommodate for the changes of the larger economic structure. Cliff’s Variety Store in San Francisco has been in the same neighborhood—the Castro—since 1936 and is still operated by members of the same family today. This neighborhood store is a place that everyone seems to need to go to every now and then. Everyday, without exaggeration, a customer will say, “Cliff’s has everything,” or “I knew that I would find it at Cliff’s.” How does a family-owned small business adapt to the community and the larger economic structure in order to survive more than one generation?
Although it seems that larger corporations are taking over the world, small businesses have an important and central part to play of the American life. For most people, the ability to have their own business symbolizes the pinnacle of the American dream. Yet, for all their importance, scholarship on the subject is lacking. Two reasons for this problem, according to Mansel Blackford, is because historians were “more interested in chronicling the [rapid change of big business] than in recording continuity” and because typically “small firms last for only a few years and fail to preserve the types of records with which historians need to work” (1991).
There can never really be a solid answer to the question of continuity. The answer to why some businesses survive and others don’t depend on a lot of different variables. This ethnography will explore variables such as demographic changes, adaptability and creativity, sense of ownership and personal agency as components of this change. However, the most important variables are the people themselves. Inevitably, the store is always remembered not because of the things we carry but because of the persons behind the merchandise. One very important person, or rather I should say team, was Ernie and Alice DeBaca.
Before we can understand Cliff’s as a store we must get to know the family that really started it all.
Ernie DeBaca was the second born in 1903. His father, Hilario DeBaca, was a school teacher and a merchant in New Mexico. By 1917, they were living in Prescott, Arizona “where with a rented horse and 12 helpers, he ran the popcorn wagon for the baseball games.” He would also work at his father’s general stores. He started working as a boilermaker’s apprentice for the Santa Fe railroad and was transferred to Richmond, California by 1920. For two years he worked building boilers and was on the boxing team for the railroad. It was the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 that led him to start the first taxi service in San Rafael. Before moving to San Rafael, however, he met Alice in Richmond.
Ernie went to the music store that Alice worked at to buy an accordion in 1921 and it wasn’t long before they were seeing each other on a regular basis and Alice would become his wife. “We never argued and we never fought... We are a team,” Ernie reports for an article in the San Francisco Examiner, 1978. Finally, they ended up in San Francisco.
Ernie was very involved in this city. He had a band in which he played the Banjo and his younger brother, Clifford, played the saxophone. The band was called the Spanish Dons. Clifford and Ernie were also bellhops at the Drake Wilshire. In the mid-1920s, Ernie went into the repair business and had a shop on Eddy Street and “he rode his blue Indian motorcycle around the city to do plumbing and electrical repair” (SF Examiner, 1978).
For reasons not entirely clear, things started to change in the 1930s. Perhaps, a big reason may have had to do with the Great Depression. Alice kept a diary at this point at the first entry reads:
Wednesday, February 22, 1933. We went out of business [as] of this day. We packed our things and stored them. We were sure tired of scraping.
Ernie and Alice found a room at the Robinson Motel and their daughter stayed with Ernie’s mother (which Alice was not too fond of). On a separate piece of paper stuck between the pages of the diary was stuck this introduction:
We quit business on Feb.22, 1933 and decided to build a house car. On Feb. 28, 1933 we started to hunt for a car that would suit us. At last we found a 1928 Studebaker President-eight sedan in March 17, 1933. the upholstery and car itself was in very good condition. [crossed out, “it really was a shame to tear it up.”] On March 21, we started the house car.
For almost three months they worked on that car until it was transformed into a house car. The first night they slept in the car was June 16, 1933. They were on there way to the World Fair in Chicago. The theme this year was “A Century of Progress.”
Along the route they would stop to camp near different cities. Ernie would go into the town to find work repairing radios. Sometimes he would do very well and other times he would find no work. On Wednesday, August 30, 1933 Alice writes, “Today Ernie went looking for a job. He went to all the stores and hotels, but couldn’t find a thing. He had to be a Mormon to get in as they nearly all asked him his religion.” This was just one of many challenges that they faced on the road together as they made there way to Chicago. The fair made a big impression on Alice, she writes on September 23, 1933:
We got up at 6 a.m. and were ready for the fair at 8:45 a.m. We went in at the 23rd Street entrance. When we entered the gate, we stopped and stared. We had a feeling of being in another world. It was gorgeous. You felt like you were looking at jewels you’d never see again.
The journey continues on from Chicago on to New Mexico meeting people along the way. Ernie would go into town to look for work and Alice would take care of the house car. In spite of stressful financial constraints they managed to have a wonderful time and Alice spoke very fondly of the people that she would meet. On Friday, December 15, 1933, Alice writes:
This morning I washed clothes ‘til the soap gave out. Then I ironed some. We left for town at 2:30 p.m. No mail. Ernie had to drain one tank to put it in the other to get started. We had 15 cents amongst us. We bought a gallon of gas for 13 cents and a screw eye for a cent. We have one cent left. Ernie was out about three hours, but didn’t make anything. Our stock is running low.
The very next day, she begins her entry: “Went to the post office and got a letter from Eloy with a $31.75 money order.” Eloy is Ernie’s next younger brother. By the end of the year they are in Albuquerque, New Mexico and Alice develops what everyone thinks is rheumatism. She is in excruciating pain and Ernie is there taking great care of her. One of her last entries, on Wednesday, January 3, 1933 she writes:
Today I had hot towel packs before I could get up. Then, I walked next door and got weighed. I still weigh 178 lbs. Then pain is so bad that I scream with pain when I have to move. I took a good hot bath which relieved me quite a lot. Ernie sure has been nice to me. I can’t even bear my weight or move my legs.
Apparently, while in Albuquerque, they converted the house car into a popcorn wagon and eventually moved on to Los Angeles and started a candy business. They returned to .San Francisco in the mid-1930s where Ernie returned to repair work and his father, Hilario DeBaca opened a small store for Ernie’s younger brother, Clifford.
Clifford was a working musician playing the saxophone and Hilario wanted to make sure that he had something stable for him to fall back on should his music career not do so well. He opened the storefront at 545 Castro Street in 1936. Ernie DeBaca describes his memory of this store in an article from the SF Examiner & Chronicle, 1979:
I came in to help. We didn’t have any money, so we started with second-hand magazines. We traded them with kids. Little by little, we were able to put in cigarettes and candy and other things, but it was slow. The first month we took in seven dollars… Anybody but my dad would have gotten disgusted and quit. He didn’t. He just stayed with it. (Chapin, 1979)
This unwavering determination is a characteristic typical of subsequent generations and is perhaps the main quality that would keep their store alive during the next several waves of major demographic changes.
In the 1940s, Ernie DeBaca had a motorcycle accident that crushed his ankle. This led him to set up shop in his father’s store and became very well known. The store started to expand and was eventually moved a few doors down to 515 Castro Street in 1942. The space was four times bigger than the previous store, yet inventory soon overwhelmed this space.
Shelves were built from the floor to the 12-foot ceiling. DeBaca invented a system of seven motorized belts that conveyed and displayed the smaller items. Flip the switch and the entire stock of records, buttons, dyes, candy, keys, greeting cards and ribbons would travel the height of the wall, cross the ceiling and pass before your eyes (Andrew, 1978).
In 1947, Ernie DeBaca’s daughter, Lorraine, gave birth to a boy that inherited his grandfather’s name and business—Ernie Asten.
Ernie grew up in the store at 515 Castro and lived with his grandparents at 142 Hartford. (They had bought the house in 1947 for $7,000). He remembers the boundaries of his world ranging from Most Holy Redeemer and the playground to Dolores Park.
Ernie: I was taken to astronomy and read books and as I got older I read denser books, saved up and bought a telescope. I was also active in electronics, my grandfather went on from teaching himself how to repair radios, to teaching himself how to repair televisions. And he would repair TVs at night while the store was still open and it was slow.
Growing up at his grandfather’s side, Ernie Asten would learn not only how to repair televisions but would also develop the same unwavering determinism that I am sure Grandpa Ernie recognized immediately in his grandson. Ernie Asten recalls, “He was very happy to include me in a lot of his projects. And I would nag him to death about wanting to help and he would say that this was a one man job. He would then work on it for a while and call me over when there was a two man job.”
Community life was different in the Castro during the 1950s. Phyllis, a relative from Alice’s side, used to take care of Ernie and remembers visiting the store on Christmas Eve to take care of him. The store was open until midnight that night and they ate fruitcake and watched the Christmas Carol. Phyllis tells me that “Alice and Ernie purchased their groceries from the local markets. These merchants then shopped at Cliffs.” This type of reciprocal relationship is an important aspect of their success. Phyllis continues describing the way of life as she remembers it:
The priests and nuns from Most Holy Redeemer Parish frequently shopeed at Cliff’s. No supermarkets at this time. You bought your meat from the butcher store, fish & poultry another store, two delis across the street, 4 bakeries, 2 pharmacies, one flower shop, several bars, cigar & magazine and the newspaper stand that sold comic books.
She goes on to mention the coffee shop next door that had a pinball machine that Alice loved to play and the famous Gertie Guernsey Ice Cream on the corner of 18th Street and Collingwood. The memory of the ice-cream store made her recall another fond memory of a summer in which Grandpa Ernie made “the real ice-cream… he used heavy whipping cream, vanilla & sugar. It was so rich and creamy, one spoonful was more than enough. It was like eating sweetened butter.”
The 1960s experienced the beginnings of some major changes in the Castro. The Haight-Ashbury district become the epicenter of the Student Rights’ Movements and the suburban exodus of the 1950s left a lot of residential units available. Cliff’s Variety moved to their third location at 495 Castro. The reason for the move was that the new location was within one block from Market and Castro (the main intersection and destination point of bus lines) instead of two blocks. The new store is more than twice as large as the last. It did not take long before that store also had merchandise filling the entire place. Also, it was this store in which Lena Sozzi would start working.
Lena Sozzi worked for Cliff’s for 26 years beginning in 1963. She was born in Italy and had a large family of her own, but for the customers and employees she was like everybody’s grandmother. When a fellow employee would have a birthday she would make them a cake and give them a little gift. One employee today that remembers her describes her as “like your conscience. She was very principled. Like a mother, she could tell if you did something wrong.” Terry Bennett, the General Manager and daughter of the current owners, says she was like her own grandmother. On May 22, 1989 she was hit by a car while running to catch the bus to get to work on time. The store was closed on the day of her funeral: Friday, May 26, 1989.
Martha Asten became an employee at Cliff’s towards the end of the 1960s about the same time that she and Ernie were married.
Martha: I went to Mercy High School, an all girl catholic high school here in the city and [Ernie] went to Riordan High School, an all boy catholic school. My just older sister, Terry, was in plays in high school and the boys would need girls for the cast and she would go audition for them. And she was in the play Pygmalion with Ernie and so she invited him to go to the first Bob Dylan concert that was showing in the Bay are and I was going with her so I met Ernie then… February 22, 1963.
So, Martha started working, making a $1.65 an hour and she saw the Castro change. She told me that “a lot of hippies started coming into the neighborhood and a bunch of them would get together and rent apartments and flats on the Castro.” It was the end of the Haight-Ashbury phenomenon in which, according to Brian Godfrey, “virtually overnight, the Haight-Ashbury became a mecca for disenchanted youth from all over America, who tended to occupy flats and homes in the flatlands, or just ‘crash’ in the park” (1988). Gays didn’t really dominate the scene quite yet, but there were some known gay business owners such as Tom Edwards of the card shop, Blue Boy, a pet store on 18th Street and the Missouri Mule, a gay bar. Martha told me that “gay in the 1960s wasn’t happening. As I started working in the store more, the hippy thing was pretty active.”
The end of the decade was punctuated by Stonewall for gay and lesbian people in 1969. The famous police raid of a gay bar in New York City and the fighting back that ensued ushered in a new era for gay and lesbian rights. The effects were far reaching and the Castro was ripe for new change. Properties started to fill up with what Martha called GINKS—Gays with Income and No Kids. Landlords were beginning to increase the rent and wanted to more than double the rent of Cliff’s current location.
When the landlord announced the rent increase to Grandpa Ernie, he responded that he would move before he would pay that kind of rent. The landlord, underestimating Ernie’s history of determination and foresight, looked around at the merchandise overfilling the store and laughed at the idea that he would actually consider moving. However, fate as usual was working in Ernie’s favor and the Bon Ami store that was located just two buildings down became available.
Martha: About that time, the Bon Ami store went belly up. They had three stores but the biggest was on 16th Street and Mission which got shut down for the BART station being put in at that time. They couldn’t sustain the business and went bankrupt. The day that they sold the store in April 1971 we made an offer on the building and were able to buy it for $98,000.
Everyone pitched in with every dime that they had. Grandpa Ernie had to mortgage the house in order to come up with the down payment.
This new location, 479 Castro Street, was once the Castro theater before they moved into their current building in the 1920s. It was a nickelodeon. The slanted floor was still there but underneath the current floor. Grandpa Ernie and his grandson, as well as a small team of others, would spend several years digging out a basement. Ernie was studying to be an engineer at City College and Grandpa Ernie had tremendous experience. They both had a natural aptitude for math and physics. Along with Martha’s brother-in-law, an architect they dug for years one aisle at a time.
Martha remembers when businesses were turning over to gay people:
Martha: The gay people who were probably part of the hippie movement but more entrepreneurial ones saw that these were really good houses and would buy up a couple of properties here and there. I think at that time Ray Herth had opened up Herth realty in the neighborhood… So properties were suddenly exchanging hands more.
Martha and Ernie bought their first home in a small row house on Market Street and 18th Street. Ernie started to work at the store full time when they opened the store. With the sudden influx of gay people with expendable income, Cliffs became the center for home improvement. Grandpa Ernie would further his reputation by walking them through whatever problem or project that they had.
Alice DeBaca died in 1971 just after the store was bought. Martha told me that “she had had diabetes for years and that is what caused the stroke that debilitated her in the 1960s. If your familiar with diabetes, “ she continues, “it causes a lot of foot ulcers and she couldn’t walk very well and they couldn’t treat it. They said that she was going to have to lose her foot and I think that broke her will to live. There was a really nasty heat wave at that time and she just had a small stroke and died.” Alice was the source of Ernie’s motivation and she would always be there with him at the store even if it meant getting there in her wheelchair. She was faithful, compassionate and full of kindness. The blue walls inside the store and the old, blue awning was Alice’s Blue.
The Eureka Valley Merchant Association would not allow gay business owners join their group. Empowered as a community, gay and lesbian people created their own merchant association and Cliff’s would be one of the first to join their roster. The folks at Cliff’s understood that times were changing and in order to survive they had to change with it. It wasn’t too long before the Eureka Valley Merchant Association had to merge with the Castro Merchants and today they are called Merchants of Upper Market and Castro (MUMC).
Demographic changes happened again in the 1980s with the AIDS crisis. The Castro began to develop a worldwide reputation as a destination for gay and lesbian people. Tolerance and freedom to live their lives honestly and with wholeness was not easy but many believed that it would be easier in San Francisco. The AIDS crisis brought the community together and created a common cause to fight for.
In the 1980s, Cliff’s Variety Store would open an annex right next door at 471 Castro. The need for more space was inevitable as more and more people moved into the neighborhood. The store was originally were they sold fabric, linens, bedding and bath accessories. Today, the annex still is where you would find fabrics, sewing notions and bath accessories, but thanks to online shopping and the dot.com boom of the 1990s the product lines began to be more high scale. Eventually the owner of the property would sell it to Cliff’s and remodeling would add an extra floor with extra storage space.
Grandpa Ernie died in 1980. His granddaughter, Terry, (who is the General Manager today) remembers him in the following way:
He was amazing. He always wore black. He always had a roll of the 5 flavor lifesavers in his pocket. I was 6 or 7 when he passed away. He took me to Disneyland for the first time when I was in kindergarten which was not that long before he passed away. But he wanted to take me to Disneyland but he would get sick and couldn’t. So, finally he was able to take me there probably within the last year orf his life with my dad.
There are certain things that you remember about people, even from being a little kid, and he was just one of those people where I know he loved me with everything he had. I mean he’s just one of those people that’s bigger than life.
Cliff’s Variety has been one of the longest standing businesses in the Castro. Their history is a testament to how the neighborhood has changed and how they have changed right along with it. Through innovative ideas and technology to unwavering determinism the folks at Cliff’s helped create, build (quite literally) and re-invent this neighborhood. The footloose cultures of gay and lesbian people, desperate to find community, settled into this neighborhood and made it what it is today. But what exactly is the Castro today? It’s not the same as it was, not that it should be, but it scarcely is the community that people think about when they mention the Castro. The days of political rallies, marches and an overall salient feel of community seem to be disappearing. Cliff’s Variety Store is much different today, but in a lot of ways it is still very much the same.
Welcome to Cliff’s Variety Store. Today, the store has almost 40 employees. The top management consists of Ernie Asten and his wife, Martha and their daughter, Terry. Because they are a corporation they are required to hold offices and have annual meetings. Ernie is the Chief Executive Officer; Martha is the Chief Financial Officer; and Terry is the General Manager. They have agreed that they must all agree on an employee before they are hired.
There are three divisions to the store: office, receiving, sales floor. Like other retail stores and companies the office is in charge of accounts receivable and payable, bookkeeping, pay roll and other administrative functions. The receiving department is extremely busy with receiving orders from vendors, pricing the merchandise, labeling, and sorting. On the sales floor, clerks are assigned either to a register or to customer service.
As you enter the store there is a whole section of toys and stationary to your right and four cashiers to your left. The store is then divided into five aisle with up to three counters going to the back of the store. The variety of merchandise is hard to measure but roughly the areas are from the first aisle to the last: hardware, electrical, paint, cleaning products, light bulbs, seasonal items, dishes and housewares. There are also paper lanterns, candles, helium balloons, and much more. The annex carries all sewing notions, fabrics, furniture, and more high end items.
The store also provides many services. They can cut keys, glass, mirror, acrylic, wood, window shades and, of course, fabric. They will recycle your light bulbs, batteries and water-based paint. As is the tradition set by Grandpa Ernie, they also offer repair work. Their website sums up their services as:
In addition to our lock and glass departments, Cliffs offers help in the form of many services including: cutting and threading pipe; cutting custom window shades; cutting shelving, plywood, and wood moldings to size; crimping wire cable; knife sharpening; and light machining. If your project has gone a little beyond your abilities, we can help.
Customer service is the main reason why people really love Cliff’s. Many employees are perceived as going over and beyond the customer’s expectations. On a day in October this year a customer was looking for a specific kind of hinge for an armoire that she owns. The hinges that were in her hand were bent. I showed them to one of the long-time employees that knew hardware really well and he said, “I have been working in hardware for 20 years and I know that we don’t have that.” Instead of sending her on her way, however, he takes what she has and places it in the vice in order to try to bend it back in place. He was somewhat successful but states that the craftsmanship of that particular type of hinge is weak. He spent some time looking through what he had and found something that would be able to work. She was delighted and left satisfied. Customer service for the staff of Cliff’s is more than trying to sell, in fact it is not very sell oriented. In other words, management does not pressure there employees to increase sells, or reach a certain quota. Instead, the focus is more on helping the customer solve their problem. Customer service is about solving problems, not making a buck. One customer asked me where do I think she could get other feathers although we sell a variety of feathers. She immediately corrected herself and said, “I guess I shouldn’t ask about competitors.” Employees at Cliff’s understand that their main objective is to satisfy the customer and are more than willing to send them to our competitors.
The managers’ responsibilities are dealing with returns and exchanges, counting money and other related banking tasks, delegating responsibilities, and other typical managerial duties. Additional responsibilities aside, managers do the same thing that all the other employees do—help solve the customers’ problems. Every employee, including the owner, can be seen on the floor talking with customers and searching for solutions.
The reasons for the success of the continuity of this particular family-owned business are obviously multi-faceted. Certainly, we can attribute much of the success to the genius of Grandpa Ernie and the DeBaca Family. Other reasons for their success might be their willingness, or insight, to adapt to the larger economic structure, the sense of ownership the employees have, and the diversity of people and talents in the workforce.
Brian Godfrey examines the effects of gentrification of the Haight-Ashbury district and his findings are comparable to the Castro District. “Gentrification,” as he defines it, is “the process of converting working-class areas into middle-class neighborhoods through a renovation of the housing stock” (1988). It further divides gentrification into two main poles of understanding: socio-cultural and political-economic. Socio-cultural factors depend on variables such as changing life-styles and demographic trends; whereas, political-economic factors “tend to view gentrification as market induced, not solely the result of consumer demand” (Godfrey, 1988).
In respect to the Castro, gentrification can be most sharply seen as happening in the 1970s when a large influx of gay men would move into the neighborhood. In this case, it is the socio-economic aspect of gentrification that is being actualized. Most of these men and women moved to the Castro because of the unacceptability of their lifestyle from their families and loved ones. They were pioneers in search of identity and power and the Castro was the perfect place to settle down. These “footloose” people migrated and settled into a neighborhood that was in desperate need of renovation. As Martha described, gay men with no income (GINKs) would buy several properties, renovate them and then sell them for a profit. Inevitably, they would need material and advice and Cliffs would be there to give them the answers they needed.
Godfrey believes that gentrification has a positive initial impulse and is “reflective of a search for a distinctive identity in American culture.” The eventual outcome is usually “overwhelmed by increasingly large-scale commercial forces” (1988). Indeed, the Castro is beginning to see the increase of large corporate own businesses and retail chains. San Franciscans tend to have a bad opinion about large scale operations, preferring instead small-family owned businesses. Home Depot just got the go ahead to build a store inside San Francisco. The general feeling is a negative for small businesses. Ernie believes that it will definitely affect business. In says, however, “San Francisco is a different environment than many of the suburbs where a Home Depot moves in and wipes everybody out.” One main concern is that a bunch or resources could be lost that Home Depot will not replicate—especially companies that work in little niches from granite countertops to Victorian ornamentation. If large corporations had their way they would simply carbon-copy their stores in every neighborhood that they move in to.
Customers frequently comment about their frustration with places like Home Depot. One customer told me that chains and Home Depot “makes everything so bland.” One day a customer was looking for a particular product that she hasn’t bought in many years and is now hard to find. She told me that she went to Home Depot and that “they were clueless.” I imagine they more or less shrugged their shoulders and didn’t investigate very far, whereas at Cliff’s when one person does not know something, there most likely is another person who might know.
A manager who has been there more than twenty years and remembers the Castro neighborhood as a little girl, sums up this process of gentrification in her own words. Relating the phenomenon of gentrification to the Castro, she says, “People who are single parents, gays, and the type move into neighborhoods with low rents, fix them up, and make them there own. Then, the large corporations recognize that these are nice neighborhoods and move in causing the rents to increase and the original tenants eventually have to move out.”
Adaptability is not something large corporations do very well. I believe the mere size of these corporations make it difficult for them to maintain intimate relations with the communities in which they are located. E.F. Schumacher says the we “suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism” (1973). He makes that very important claim that large corporations no longer exist within political boundaries. Large corporations have a lot of power and smaller corporations or sole proprietors need to be find creative ways just to keep up.
For Cliffs, competing with large corporations meant becoming one itself. In 1973, Cliff’s Variety Store became a store front for DeBaca, Inc. The DeBaca Corporation is a Class S Corporation which means that only the shareholders pay income tax on their shares instead of paying a corporate income tax. There is only one shareholder at Cliff’s—Ernie. A corporation must also have officers and directors, have annual meetings and take minutes. Ernie, Martha and Terry are the members of the board of directors. Consequently, they have more flexibility in how they can run the business. Today, Ernie tells me that he probably would look at other form like limited partnership, or a trust but that at the time it was a good move.
Another difficulty in regards to the macro-economic structure was the closure of a lot of local vendors. One employee who has worked for Cliff’s for many years reminds me that in the 1960s most products were made in the United States. Today, merchandise is manufactured around the globe and rarely in the United States. Although Cliff’s still maintains relationships with several local vendors, they have had to look all across the country to find distributors and vendors to stock their store. Eventually, in 2001, Cliff’s became a member of Ace Hardware in order to be able to get products at competitive prices.
Cliff’s is not the only hardware store that is part of the Ace Co-operative. More than a dozen hardware stores around the city are members. Representatives from all the stores would meet periodically to talk business and learn different ways in which they can cooperate with each other. Some distributors refuse to deal with small businesses thinking that the amount of merchandise they will purchase is minuscule compared to the larger corporations. Ace Hardware is different in that you do not have to be a branded store. Although a member of Ace Hardware, Cliff’s is an Independent Branded Retailer which means that they are not assessed and they are not required to carry certain brands. This type of flexibility was crucial for business at Cliffs because the Ace logo means big corporation for many people and as one customer told Ernie once, “I would really hate to see this place become an Ace Hardware.”
Sense of ownership is an important factor regarding the longevity of employees and basic quality of work standards. The top management at Cliff’s assigns employees of all positions to a certain department to manage, organize and buy product for. This is a deliberate attempt to make employees feel empowered and create loyalty. Terry, the General Manager, explains that “part of keeping people longer is giving people ownership in the store. If someone is here and it is just a retail job you are not going to keep people very long. When you get to make decisions about merchandise coming into the store, or how things look you take more ownership in it and you take more pride in the job you are doing and it makes it so it is more than just any other retail job.”
Other retail jobs according to some of the employees make you following a marketing device called a plan-o-gram when placing merchandise in the store. Somebody in an office far away determines that a store must look a certain way and the employees must strictly adhere to their standards. Employees at Cliff’s experience that there voices and ideas are heard and actualized. They feel a bigger sense of creative outlet and sense of responsibility to make sure that the products that they have ordered sell well.
A very good story that illustrates the owners of Cliff’s interest in their employees and this one’s particular entrepreneurial success is about Deki. Deki is a Tibetan from India. She sells jewelry and Tibetan textiles and things. Many people in the Castro would visit her in the hallway that was right next to the store. It was a door that led to the back of the store and was rarely used. Her reputation grew thanks to the generosity of the owners providing her space and eventually when she found a storefront with low enough rent, a difficult thing in the Castro, she moved there. Now she is located on 18th and Collingwood, just a block away and she is still an employee at Cliff’s.
One more point of analysis that I would like to talk about regards Halloween. Halloween in the Castro before the 1970s revolved around the children. In 1967, a San Francisco Examiner news article, titled Lots of Treats, Little Trickery, mentions the relatively low crime that happened on Halloween. It also talks about The Castro’s Halloween event:
At 18th and Castro Streets, a neighborhood tradition was renewed for the 29th year. Ernie DeBaca, the operator of Cliff’s Variety, 495 Castro St., dressed in cabellero fashion and staged a Halloween show for the neighborhood. He inveigled kids to climb onto a flatbed truck and take part in a cherry-pie eating contest (“hands behind your back, and don’t eat the next guy’s pie) and prizes for the best costumes.
The reporter asks Ernie why he continues to host this “street affair” and Ernie looks over at the sleepy 3rd place winner dressed as a lamb, smiles and says, “I like doing things for the kids—it keeps the kids happy and out of trouble.”
The manager that has been her for the longest and remembers the way Halloween used to be remembers that “during a pie eating contest a gay guy threw pie in Grandpa Ernie’s face—not funny—and that is when things started to change.” Ever since 1979, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have taken over the Halloween costume contest for the kids and still do it to this day, but the neighborhood Halloween party grew to proportions to large and unmanageable for a neighborhood this size. Gun shootings, increased theft and other crimes have made headlines every year. City official are exasperated trying to find solutions. My opinion is that the solution lies in making the event about children again. The neighborhood still has a lot of families with children, but few businesses cater to them. Even gay families nowadays have children and live within this neighborhood.
According to Ernie, “there is very little for children and for the families to be able to enjoy publicly.”
Ernie: I wasn’t as aware of that, I became aware of it of course as Halloween became from fun to vicious. The adults were no longer mature enough to allow children to have part of that evening for themselves to enjoy.
But I wasn’t aware of the entire cultural change away from simply accommodating little people until I went to Australia to visit Martha’s sister. And the Australian culture is so much more accommodating to children and families without it being a 50s sitcom kind of culture. They recognize that people exist in all different ages and they are all entitled to some accommodation.
It is important to look back while at the same time move forward in order to recognize the ways that we grow as a culture. Through the perspective of Cliff’s we can learn some valuable lessons on how neighborhoods grow and change and adapt to their surrounding. This paper barely skims the surface of all the things that I learned from Cliff’s. So, regard this paper for now as a rough draft and perhaps one day a more comprehensive story can be told—but it would have to be a book, because a report of this length just cannot give it justice.
Godfrey, Brian J.
1988. Neighborhoods in Transition. The Making of San Francisco’s Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities. University of California: Berkeley
Schumacher, E.F.
1973. Small is Beautiful. Economics as if People Mattered. The Borgo Press:
San Bernardino, CA
Blacford, Mansel G.
1991. Small Business in America: A Histiographic Survey
McDermott, John.
1991. Corporate Society: Class, Property and Contemporary Capitalism,
Westview Press: Boulder, CO
SF Sunday Examiner
1979, Nov 11. He Lives to Work. p B1
San Francisco Chronicle
1974, Mar. 8 Where Customers Are Not Just Faces. p23
Noe Valley Voice
1980, Aug. Castro Street Merchant Dies. p3
SF Examiner
1967, Nov 1. Lots of Treats, Little Trickery. p3
SF Examiner
1978, Feb 15. The Importance of Being Ernie. pB9
Website: http://www.cliffsvariety.com
Interviews:
Ernie Asten, Martha Asten and Terry Bennett