Residents in San Francisco’s far southwest corner have been without easy access to a grocery store since 2013, a problem serious enough that the city’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development made a point of recruiting retailers to an overlooked sliver of the city known as the Merced Extension Triangle.
Finally, one is coming. Korean specialty chain H Mart, based in New Jersey, will open its store by the end of November, if all goes as planned.
H Mart’s arrival is worth watching for many reasons, and not just for the grocery-starved residents nearby. “Right now, we’re underserved,” says Marc Christensen, vice president of the Merced Extension Triangle Neighborhood Association.
For all of its wealth and tech-savvy, San Francisco still has pockets without access to fresh, affordable groceries. But the last time OEWD brought a retailer to a neighborhood that lacked food access, things didn’t go as planned.
The previous market in the spot where H Mart is moving didn’t provide customers what they wanted, and it eventually shut down.
San Francisco is struggling right now with the difficulties of brick-and-mortar retail, and the grocery business is facing more competition from online delivery services. (One study suggests 49 percent of Americans shop for food online.) But not everyone wants, or can afford to, shop for food that way.
Given all that, can an old-school, brick-and-mortar, big-footprint market succeed in this hidden pocket of San Francisco?
‘Like an island’
The Merced Extension Triangle — not quite Oceanview, and south of Merced Heights — sits to the east of Lake Merced and the elite San Francisco Golf Club, bordered by freeways on two sides and the busy, four-lane Alemany Boulevard on a third. According to Woody LaBounty, San Francisco historian and founder of the Western Neighborhoods Project, the triangle was one of the last parts of the city to be developed. The neighborhood is anchored in the center by the OceanView Village shopping center, home to a Chase Bank, 24 Hour Fitness, Extreme Pizza, and a few other small retailers. On top of the plaza sit 370 apartment units that were built in 2002. But the area “is like an island,” says LaBounty. “Unless you stumbled on it because you were lost, you wouldn’t know it was there.”
Adding to the plaza’s obscurity, its largest storefront has been empty for six years. Today the only sign of life left inside the empty 42,000 square-foot space is a large banner hanging above an empty refrigerator case advertising “Cold Beer,” proudly encouraging shoppers to embrace the Year of the Snake. That was in 2013.
Recent history has not been kind to the space. From 2002 to 2006, it was an Albertson’s, until it fell victim to a wave of Northern California closures across the chain. The site then reopened as Oceanview Supermarket in 2007 and became a popular destination for foodies, thanks to its in-store hot pot restaurant. But residents say the supermarket struggled to maintain inventory, didn’t carry products customers wanted, and occasionally lacked English-speaking staff. After years of complaints and a costly safety violation, Oceanview closed in 2013, and shoppers were left trekking to the Trader Joe’s in Stonestown or the Pacific Supermarket further down Alemany.
H Mart is short for ‘Han Ah Reum,’ or ‘One Arm Full of Groceries.’
The robust neighborhood association, METNA, began lobbying for a new grocery store right away. “They were saying, ‘Please help us any way you can,’” says District 7 Supervisor Norman Yee. The group also pled its case to OEWD, which is in charge of attracting businesses to the city.
That department reached out to several national chains to drum up interest. According to OEWD director Joaquín Torres, his office first had a meeting with H Mart in 2015, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere. “We thought that lead might have expired,” says Torres. “But they decided to come back to us, somewhat out of the blue.”
When asked why it took three years to come to a deal, an H Mart spokesperson said via email that the company was reviewing business plans and working out the lease. “The city and county of San Francisco is the ‘compassionate’ and ‘golden’ city, where advanced and diversified lifestyle lives in,” the spokesperson wrote, regarding the company’s decision to pursue the site.
With the tagline “A Korean Tradition Made in America,” the first H Mart opened in Queens, New York, in 1982, and now has 66 stores in 12 states. According to its website, H Mart is short for “Han Ah Reum,” or “One Arm Full of Groceries.”
Plans for the new store were finally announced last August, much to the delight of nearby residents. “It will give people an excellent choice to shop for the majority of their groceries there,” METNA vice president Christensen says.
Adds Glen Hatakeyama, the group’s president: “As long as they offer the products people want.”
In September, H Mart drove Christensen, Hatakeyama, and other residents down to its San Jose location in a rented tour bus. “It’s a huge store, and it’s mostly Asian products,” says Hatakeyama, recalling one reason for Oceanview Supermarket’s closure. “I said, ‘There doesn’t seem to be a good number of American products here.’ Their answer to that, which I guess I’m ambivalent about, was that when they did their research, the demographic in the [San Jose] neighborhood where the store is was 80 percent Asian.”
The greater Lake Merced area is around 44 percent Asian, according to the Census Bureau. Via email H Mart’s spokesperson says they’re planning for a demographic of “50 percent of Asian-American customers and 50 percent of American customers,” adding, “H Mart always changes, adopts, and adjusts according to communities’ requirements” and “would love the neighborhood and surrounding communities to [have] access to healthy and high-quality food, providing diversities of cuisine that will aim to be an eating and drinking destination.”
Don’t sleep on the mac and cheese
For Hatakeyama and other residents, it’s important the new store offer affordable staples — things like canned soup, beans, and veggies, and macaroni and cheese — in addition to the Korean products H Mart is known for. They worry that if the incoming store fails to cater to a diverse group of residents, it will suffer the same fate as its predecessor.
Larry Brucia, president of the Bay Area grocery-consulting firm Sutti Associates, says the store would be smart to evaluate what the neighborhood specifically wants, and replace some of its less-popular Asian products with more commonly used items.
Product balance is only one of the challenges H Mart faces. OEWD director Torres acknowledges that food retail is rapidly changing, and the future might not be physical stores. Throughout the city, he says, figuring out what’s “viable” for retail of all kinds is an ongoing puzzle.
Online competition is a struggle for brick-and-mortars, but Brucia says plenty of local businesses continue to grow thanks to their customer fan base. “Customers want to have a good experience when they walk into a store … A retailer that’s aggressive and willing to work with the community” is more likely to succeed, he says, citing the local chain Gus’ Community Market, which recently opened its fourth location, as one example.
The same can’t be said for Duc Loi’s Pantry on 3rd Street, which closed earlier this year. Residents say the store struggled with low inventory and limited product offerings, failing to gain customer loyalty. It opened in 2016 with much fanfare and help from OEWD, which gave the owners of the original Duc Loi on Mission Street a $250,000 grant and a $4.1 million loan to acquire and develop the Bayview location. As The Frisc was first to report in February, it was shuttered after two years in operation. (Torres declined to comment on the record about the closure.)
OEWD is not giving H Mart financial assistance, but the department is helping usher the store through the permitting process, according to Torres.
For H Mart then, the trick is to convince neighbors that they don’t have to drive elsewhere or turn to online delivery to get what they want at reasonable prices. METNA’s Christensen says that prices at the San Jose location seemed on par with Safeway and Albertson’s and “their quality looks very, very good.”
As for beating out online delivery services, H Mart’s more unusual offerings may just be what bring people into the store. Even Supervisor Yee says the store needs standout products to lure his wallet. “Will I shop there regularly? Probably not. But I might pop in once in a while to buy things that are harder to find at Whole Foods.”
Though Yee doesn’t live within easy walking distance of the store, thousands of other potential customers do. If H Mart can find the right formula of product diversity, customer service, and affordable prices, it may be able to win them over where others have failed.
Andrea Powell (@AndreaPowellSF) is a freelance journalist in San Francisco. She previously worked at Wired and San Francisco magazines.