ONE YEAR IN: Buyer’s Best Friend

Adam Sah was a Googler whose fiancée, Joyce Guan worked as a food broker, discovering artisan brands and shepherding them to the shelf at stores such as Bi-Rite, Rainbow and Whole Foods. Putting their heads together, they opened Buyer’s Best Friend, which began as an online specialty wholesaler that has since grown to three retail locations (the Haight, North Beach and the Ferry Building). BBF made its mark by stocking exceptional chocolates, olive oils and of course, the highly sought-after Stumptown Coffee. Plus, their liberal sampling policy resembles the world’s most permissive parent.

As the Haight Street flagship celebrates its first year in business, Eater sat down with Sah to talk about aesthetics and authenticity, how his tech background influences everything, and having to be taught to operate a cash register.

How did the idea for a retail store strike you?

Adam Sah: We opened the store because we’re the world’s largest catalog for wholesale artisan specialty food and personal care items. These days we work with just shy of 2200 brands and 127,000 items for sale. It’s a classic internet store. We use the internet to find these brands, who are looking to get found, and looking to get in the marketplace, and we connect them with buyers. Small buyers just register for themselves online and the large ones we find at trade shows. We work with everybody. Small independent markets, like Haight Street Market down the street, pick up brands that are here and vice versa. It’s classic “co-opetition.”

When 500 brands each send a box of samples, and it shows up in your living room, you have a big problem. November, a year and a half ago, I could watch the boxes coming into our house, and we have a Victorian six blocks from here, and used to put it on a piece of graph paper, and we were like, “Wait a minute.”

So it was, “Agh! Exponential inventory growth. We need space.”

Yeah, with each brand joining, we were going to be out of space. It wasn’t quite exponential, but strong linear. A friend suggested we open a retail store. I said, “Well, I don’t know anything about retail. I come from the tech world. Retail, I don’t want to touch that.” But the more we looked into it, the more we liked the idea, also from the tech world, of “Eat Your Own Dog Food. Live it.”

It’s the opposite of a drug dealer. You know, “Don’t do your own stash.”

Well, there’s a lot of authenticity. These are artisan brands. They join this out of passion, not to be the next Bill Gates or something. So we said, “Let’s just try it.” We had no idea this would be a success literally overnight. We’re sitting here in a store in the middle of the week, and there’s people here. There’s always people here. Normally, food businesses take decades to get traction, but this is a small-format store, it’s not expensive to open. It’s really about sourcing the products. The thing we didn’t know if it would work or not was if it would matter to consumers. But we’re the only business I know of that ran a Yelp Elite event and our average score actually went down, because our average score is practically perfect. [Laughs] Neither Joyce nor I had worked ever retail — not even in high school or college. We had to be taught by our own staff how to use a cash register. Talk about humiliating!

Even today, it’s been a year, and we run experiments all the time. For example, there was a big debate: do we do an open sign or not? [Note: they did.] Unbelievable, immediate impact, even though grocery stores don’t have an open sign and every restaurant does. And that’s the thing, are we a grocery store? Are we a convenience store? Are we a retailer? Or a boutique? The answer is we’re some blend of those things. We absolutely cherry-pick good ideas from each one, try them and see if they work for these products in this setting, and if they do, great.

Dare I ask what some of your failures are? We’ll move on to successes in a second.

Merchandising is the classic. We’re still struggling with signage. Fingers crossed, we’ve brought in one of the pros. I don’t want to name names, but she’s well-known in San Francisco. We didn’t even have a sign on the outside of the store for the first six months and I just heard one too many times, “I tried to find the store and I couldn’t find it.” OK, we’ve got to get a sign outside. Incredibly expensive proposition. You have to get five different parties to agree.

Another example is inside the store. Do you have shelf tags like a grocery store? Do you do it like a boutique and have something cute? I have no idea. We’re currently in a transition period, so what we have there right now is hopefully going to get upgraded one more time. You can’t make it like a grocery store because it destroys the gestalt of being a boutique, but if you do boutique, you just don’t scale.

And by asking for the price, you can be made to feel gauche, right?

Yeah. And in some settings, people know how much something’s going to cost. In this one, it’s artisan product. Nobody knows. A lot of people don’t care. So you have to appeal to all these different kinds of people. One of the things that’s tricky is that most boutiques can define their customers, but ours is anybody with a wallet and a stomach.

The thing that connects with everyone is samples. Normally, artisans have to pay to get retailers to sample out for them, but here we just offer it for free. We tell customers that you can taste or try just about anything before you buy, and people really connected with that. That’s been a consistent part since we opened and people love it. We’re now sampling so many different items that no one person could sample the store in one trip. It would probably take ten trips.

So it’s kind of like the Louvre. You can’t do it all in one day.

That’s correct. And yet, it’s not a big store. It’s just very densely packed.

How are the three stores different?

When we opened Haight Street, the feedback I got was very mixed. We survey our customers continuously, and they love us, but we brought in some food and retail experts, and they all pooh-poohed it. They said, “This Victorian setting, I don’t get it.” And we were like, “It’s kind of like a World’s Fair.” You know, a sense of discovery.

Which World’s Fair? Panama-Pacific 1915? Chicago 1893?

Now you’re getting specific! It’s turn-of-the-century Chicago, like the White City. That kind of evoked the concept — plus we live in a Victorian from 1891, so I know where to get chandeliers and stuff. It was relatively easy for us to do this kind of style and it’s very consistent with the Haight.

But for the second location, which was North Beach, everybody wanted us to be more explicitly Italian. At the same time, the ceilings are not as tall, so you can’t hang a chandelier from an eight-foot ceiling. We decided to do something more traditional-retailer: white walls, bookshelves instead of wire racks. Some people said it looks more like a Williams-Sonoma. People love that layout as well, but Haight Street is still the most successful store.

What about the Ferry Building kiosk?

You don’t get as much choice. Every square inch counts. We love the Ferry Building and from what we can tell, the Ferry Building loves us. It’s extremely expensive real estate but the actual people you work with are the sweetest people in the world and they are super-careful to be super-authentic about local artisan products. They are very persnickety. The proposition of BBF — which was a gamble, and mind you we’ve only been open for six months — is that we’re an aggregator of artisan goods, and we’re really different from the people who make the product. They’re very different sets of skills. When it comes to pricing and promotions and merchandising, already we know way more than the manufacturers do about how to make their products appealing to customers. And when you compare the results, we do a better job of selling their product than they do, actually. And if you stop and think about it, of course it’s not a surprise. The person who writes software versus the person who sells software — they don’t look the same, they don’t act the same, of course they’re different people.

You’re really talking like a Googler now.

Yeah! But why shouldn’t it be? The idea that you simply take a product and set it on a shelf is just completely wrong. There’s a tremendous amount of value to be created in the shopping experience, more than the experts we brought in would have thought. You have to be very good at moving a lot of inexpensive physical objects around all day long.

From here, do we expand the retail concept in directions that are not necessarily aligned with wholesale? You’ll notice that we don’t sell refrigerated sandwiches. We don’t have any of the permits for full-service, but if someone were to come in, place them in our refrigerators, sure. We’ve done a few tests, like Home.Sweet.Flowers comes in and we’ve helped her find other accounts.

Are there plans to expand to more locations?

Yes.

In San Francisco or beyond?

Both. Of course in San Francisco, because once you’ve set up three, it’s relatively easy to do more. We depend on the good graces of the neighborhood and casual foot traffic, because so far, these stores are not destinations on their own. So we can’t be in an out-of-the-way place. Plus, tourists really love these stores.

But if tourists love it, it really is a destination.

Well, yes, but it takes years and years for tourists to hear about you enough so that when they come to the city, you’re on a list of things to do. Plus, when I think of a destination, it’s “I’m going to make a special trip to that place.” Best not to fool yourself into thinking you’re a destination if you’re not. I’m grateful to my neighborhoods and communities because they’re the ones who support us five days a week, although throngs of tourists in the summer are terrific. We’ve managed to walk that fine line where it’s authentic to both. If anything, we’re on the side of being more authentic to locals and if the tourists don’t necessarily get it, too bad, because the other 364 days we’re going to be supported by the neighborhood.

So of all your 2200 brands, which are your absolute favorites?

That’s like asking which child I love the most.

Sophie’s Choice, Adam. Or at least, what are the customers’ favorites?

The balsamics from Italy, definitely. They come in six, eight, twelve and twenty-five years. Emmy’s Pickles. Teatulia. Overall, we love any novel things that aren’t just a commodity. Or anything you have to try in order to buy.

Rupert Murdoch

I’d be very skeptical if the scandal unfolding actually laid low the media empire that is News Corp, but there are some things worth noting about this. First, as accurate as it is to say that Murdoch and his company are forces for conservatism in the affluent English-speaking countries, in Italy he’s got the one property that isn’t owned by Silvio Berlusconi (himself sort of evil Mike Bloomberg; read the New Yorker article if you haven’t), which pits them not only as the opposition but also, effectively, the mainstream left.

Second, Rupert Murdoch doesn’t want to advance the cause of conservatism as much as he wants to destroy the power of the media to act as a check on power. This intensely destructive philosophy finds a natural niche on the right because of its pro-corporate orientation and the cultural aversion towards dirty hippies and other folks who aren’t gaga for getting stomped in the face by transnational capital. But he’s different from Roger Ailes, the head of Fox and true believer in the Republican Party.

Murdoch’s an extremely adroit practitioner of the ultimate corporatist strategy of keeping regular folks at each other’s throats when we should all be allied against him and the other people at the top. What is the news cycle? It’s not a parade of effective muckraking wherein corrupt people are thwarted and the massing of wealth and power gets its due comeuppance by a healthy democratic polity’s vigorous Fourth Estate. It’s a top-down nightmare of competing resentments.

Liberals find Michelle Bachmann ignorant and scary (and freakishly focused; she’s what Sarah Palin was supposed to be). Movement conservatives flock to her because as a first principle, they’ll gravitate towards whatever those snobbish, effete liberals hate the most, and other conservatives will find reasons to support her. The act of exposing Markus and Michelle Bachmann’s predictably awful Christian weirdness just hardens her white, middle-class fan base all the more because their basic grievances (there’s no work to be had, no guarantee of getting ahead even when there is, and life sucks) are legitimate and Rupert Murdoch and his ilk have been successful at channeling it and, unfairly or not, hammering at liberalism’s comparative inability to do so.

Fluffing the people who “got” Michelle Obama for eating a cheeseburger or who express outrage at the things that come out of Fred Phelps’s mouth is entertaining, and jabbing at a person’s moral superiority with a stick is a great way to keep them all exercised and paying attention, but it’s also complete bullshit. Measurable depreciations in the standard of living are really all that matter, but they involve math instead of dick tweets or verbal gaffes.

Almost every Tea Partier could be a Democrat, since when you strip away the ignorance of history and the false consciousness and the overt racism and the gold fetish and the misplaced rage at who it is who took their country away, it’s the Democratic Party who used to be able to address their fundamental anxiety. (Of course, the Democratic Party used to be really racist, too, but that’s a whole other subject).

There’s a natural alliance there, but the sophisticated half of the country thinks the patriotic half is stupid and the forgotten half thinks the entitled half is a cancer.

Anyway, this whole dynamic is precisely what Rupert Murdoch stokes. If you believe that the overarching problem with everything in the United States is imperial plutocracy’s tendency to gobble everything, no matter how obviously unsustainable, destructive and anti-democratic, you must agree that Murdoch is the primary enabler. He exists to enhance power. If he can be toppled, we have a chance.

In the meantime, the News of the World is gone. That’s one fewer tabloid out there, which is fine because I always preferred the Sun, anyway. Page 3 has tits!

RuPaul’s Drag Race Episode IV: A New Hope

There is just nothing to say except that Ongina‘s breaking down after winning the MAC Viva Glam challenge and admitting that she has HIV and her parents don’t know might be the singularly most intense moment of reality television I’ve ever witnessed.

Let’s face it, “Reality TV” is as scripted as anything else, the producers of any elimination-show have the final say–which they probably exercised this week, since Jade was superior to Rebecca Glasscock in every case, except for the ability to produce drama.  So for something so honest as a nationally televised admission of a person’s HIV status to emerge is startling.

I’m not suggesting that TV people would generally self-censor something like that, but it’s still uncommon.  Even RuPaul was a little taken aback.  So while I’m not sure Ongina can or should win the competition, I think she’s pretty courageous and I love her.  She got a little lucky with the screen test, though, because it called for jubilation and bubbliness, and that’s what she brings.

Bebe Zahara Benet, though.  Whoa.  I think her downfall might be the inevitable realization that this piddling little show on a mediocre niche cable channel is kind of beneath her.  If this were Italy or Mexico, she would be hosting a primetime show where she would interview political figures and could torpedo their careers.  I don’t care if she has only one facial expression.  She’s an empress.  And she’s only 23?  She looks simultaneously older and ageless.  It’s entirely possible that she’s a crazy person, though.  I just get that vibe.

God, could Shantelle be more self-important?  Given the opportunity to be glamorous and fun, she squandered it on literally lecturing the camera for ten whole minutes without even coming to the point.  She even dressed like an old maid schoolmarm.  How revealing.

Nina Flowers has been getting rickety.  I think she has the best look, but everything she does is a variation on it.  As odious as Shantelle may be, her versatility is formidable and I see the two of them vying for the third spot in the finals, since Ongina and Bebe have probably clinched the top two.  Nina’s non-facility with English hasn’t hampered her so far, but it might.

I wonder if Nate Silver win analyze the probability of each queen winning…

All the Frivolity That’s Fit to Shit Out

I’m not scolding.  Smart people enjoy stupid shit, and I’m as big a lover of bright, shiny things as anyone else.  But this was just hilarious.  The Times website is currently a roster of meaningless crap, bookended by truly pointless articles that come from the Week in Review and Metro sections.

When people say they hate the media and when venerable media institutions wither, this is why.  It’s nice to leaven an economic depression with inanity, but shouldn’t the Times have a marketing department with a mission statement and shit, or highly-compensated people who work on maintaining their core brand?

If people want to read these kinds of things, they’re going to go to LOLcats.

Totally Hot Brazilian Guy in the NYT

Sander Mecca went to jail for two years for selling ecstasy in Sao Paulo because Brazil has no minimum threshold for when possession becomes dealing.  Sads!  Meanwhile, Argentina is about to decriminalize possession of some drugs. Having spent the semester during and after September 11th there, I can vouch for the quality of Argentine drugs, which are lots of fun and I encourage students to study abroad there and do them.

It’s also nice to see the NY Times comfortably use the word rave without quotation marks, or call it a Ra ve the way they still refer to websites as Web sites.

Sander looks even moodier and cuter in the b/w photo in the print copy.  Who’s that on his shirt?  It looks like Viggo the Carpathian (scourge of the EPA).  What a babe.

Maureen Dowd: Just a Bad Person?

In addition to bizarre full-page ads like the one I mentioned two days ago, another pleasurable thing about the dead-tree version of newspapers is the ironic juxtaposition of articles and opinion pieces.  For example, on Sunday in hte NYT there was a smart article about how in light of Rod Blagojevich (and the other 3 governors who appointed interim senators) the 17th Amendment should be updated so that, as with House vacancies, Senate seats are filled by special election.

Adjacent to this highminded contribution to public discourse is the real estate occupied by Maureen Dowd.  Her column was devoted to attacking David Paterson.  She spends the first two paragraphs lionizing Rod Blagojevich, lavishing attention on his hair in that semi-ironic way she has of dabbling at arm’s length with girlish crushes on powerful public figures–so that you think she’s kidding when she’s really not.

The rest of her column is pretty amazing.  While it’s fair to say that Paterson waited a weirdly long time to appoint Kirsten Gillibrand, Dowd takes an almost personal offense at how he didn’t appoint Caroline Kennedy.

The Democrats would have had another Kennedy int he Senate representing New York – Bobby’s niece and a smart, policy-oriented, civic-minded woman to whom the president feels deeply indebted in an era when every state has its hand out.  Instead they have Gillibrand who voted against the Wall Street – as in New York  – bailout bill.

Holy shit!  First, this obsession with the Kennedys is too much.  Why are they so fucking great?  They’re mostly just tragic.  Not even Bush got us closer to nuclear war than JFK did.  He was a mediocre president, and that’s that.  Bobby Kennedy was cool, but his assassination precluded him from doing much, either.  Being his niece is not a qualification.  It’s not even that interesting.  As for “civic-minded” and “policy-oriented,” those terms are so vague as to encompass nearly everybody.  They certainly don’t exclude Kirsten Gillibrand, about whom Dowd literally gossips:

The 42-year old Gillibrand, who has been in the House for only two years, is known as opportunisticc and sharp-elbowed.  Tracy Flick is her nickname among colleagues int he New York delegation, many of whom were M.I.A. at her Albany announcement.

Fellow Democrats were warning Harry Reid on Friday that he was going to have his hands full with te new senator because she’s “a pain.”

That unattributed quote says it all.  Maureen Dowd is a hypocrite and a malicious bitch.  She can’t even come up with a decent adjective to pump up the dynastic cipher she so desperately wanted to crown, but she will totally parrot the most cowardly kind of innuendo–and if a man spoke publicly about Gillibrand this way Maureen Dowd would be the first to call him a sexist asshole.

Gillibrand is too moderate.  But she won her election in 2006 in a Republican district and hopefully will lean leftward without the same electoral pressure.  We’ll just have to see.  Whereas Hillary Clinton, David Paterson, Andrew Cuomo and Caroline Kennedy are all married to or descended from prior politicians, Gillibrand is not.  Unless she told Maureen Dowd to go fuck herself, there is nothing on the merits that suggests the process leading to her selection as senator was corrupt or inappropriate.

Except for, you know, that neighboring opinion piece that puts this whole shit fit into perspective.

*************************

Putting Maureen Dowd into perspective, these are the most contemptible women in the world.

Two Potential Road Trip Routes

In pursuit of reaching all 50 states before I’m 30 (as I promised I would do when I was 20; seven to go), here are some road trip itineraries.  Not that they go to that many states, but I want to go everywhere.

S.F. – Carson City/Reno – Boise – Bend, OR – Crater Lake – S.F. At 1500 miles, this would take 28 hours of driving.  Which means you would do it in five days, six if you stayed in Crater Lake an extra day.  (Bend is where the Thomas Beatie, the Pregnant Man lives.  He had the baby and is pregnant again.  I would like to drive there and tell him how I support his radically normal agenda.)

S. F. – Yosemite – Kings Canyon/Sequoia Nat’l Parks – Death Valley – Las Vegas – Joshua Tree – Coastline – S. F. This one would be way longer.  It’s 1600 miles plus adventures within the national parks, but a lot of it is windy backroads.  Especially the last leg, going up the coast on 1.  It wouldn’t be quite as terrifying to do that drive at night as it is to come south, because the Pacific isn’t right below you heading north, but it would take an eternity.  An amazing eternity.  And by going to Death Valley one simply must visit the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction.  Not that I have yet.

Pandora Gets Passive-Aggressive

Ahem, if you’re not going to order another soy chai, get out.

Do I really need to feel apologetic to a website cause I got up and did something else?  (I’m being a total grandpa about this, aren’t I?)

I admit I cried a little

Yea!  We’ve now got a Muslim president who hates America!  I’m so happy, I could launch a rocket at Tel Aviv.  Abortions for all!  Michelle Obama: tell us what you really think.

So I’ve now been alive under five presidents.  (Funny how between 1963 and 1977 there were five presidents, and how there might also be five from 1981-2017, almost three times as long).  Hopefully this one will be better.  We could have done a lot worse.  You know, like we always have.

Little can be added to the voluminous discourse on how historical today really is, so I’ll skip it.  It’s a biggie, we get it.  I did notice, though, in the run-up to the whole affair, how Republicans were largely on their best behavior.  Let’s hope it stays that way among the rump caucus of dead-enders for a long while.  I heard George Radonovich, who represents Modesto in the House, on NPR and while he’s crazy and thinks everything that needs to happen is “socialist,” (to be expected) I also noticed that there is a tendency to see Obama’s inauguration as a triumph, at last, over slavery.

One of the reasons NPR pales beside the BBC is how they let things like that go.  Slavery.  That’s it?  What about the subsequent 130+ years of oppression which are still going on?  I’m not sure this squares well with history.  It reminds me of how, when the Democrats were in the Senate minority, the use of the filibuster was so contentious that a “Gang of 14” had to have a confab to prevent the chamber itself from imploding.  Now that Republicans regard it as simply what you use when you’re about to lose a vote, it’s become just another complex mechanism inherent to the legislative process.  Oh, that liberal media.

Also, seems like both Obama and Chief Justice Roberts kind of fucked up the oath a little bit.  How long before wingnuts take this as Birth Certificate Part II and claim Obama isn’t really the president?

And what about Aretha?  The hat.  Just faboo.  The Bush Administration ended when the fat lady sang.

OMG, hot!

Lemonade Cleanse

I’m doin it, baby.  I need to detox ’08 0ut of me.  (Shouldn’t have sucked all the mercury out of those dragon rolls).   No more solid food until we have a new president.

I did it last year and can confirm the rumors that it’s amazing, as long as you know what it isn’t: a weight-loss program.  I lost 14 pounds in 14 days but gained it all back within a week.  However, with the benefit of hindsight, I’ll be taking acidophilus as soon as I’m done so I can rebuild healthy intestinal flora.  That way you don’t have to eat a huge quantity of food just to absorb the normal amount of nutrients.

I did it for 12 days last January, and I had tons of energy–I found waking up at 5am because of laxative tea I drank the night before was enough sleep.  Plus your sense of smell improves dramatically, since the cleanse essentially purges the body of mucus and of course the nasal passages are a major mucus locus (eww).  While you do get an increased sensitivity to cold, and climbing several flights of stairs (or, say, a hill in San Francisco) can be taxing, it’s the shit.  You don’t experience unbearable hunger pangs, except on Day 2, which is the Wall. (I will be spending my Wall serving crab to old people at a country club.  Could get ugly).

14 days of warm, cayenne-y lemonade gets kind of monotonous but by the time you’re done everything tastes amazing.  Your caffeine and alcohol tolerances are sharply reduced, so you don’t be sucking back one red eye after another just to keep from screaming, nor will you drop $30 in a dive so easily.

It’s kind of a test of endurance.  If you can endure drinking a colonic salt water flush every morning, you can endure a lot.  (Sucking it down while it’s still hot is key; it’s like broth that way.  Otherwise, you’re just gulping the sea).  It’s like reading Pynchon or being a candidate in a primacaucus.