I know the idea of a reality show about Ike's seem ludicrous, but it appears to be true.  Posted yesterday to Facebook:

The Ike's Place reality show could be a reality! Tomorrow morning(4/11) at 10am, representatives from Indigo Films via the Discovery Channel will be filming the first 'episode'. Shooting should go until 1pm. Come stop by and say Hi—You could be the next reality TV star!

I'm sorry, but if ordering a sandwich makes you a reality TV star, you're doing it wrong.  It takes a very special kind of princess to order a “Mobile Momma” and then immediately start freaking the fuck out because it's going to be another 20 minutes before the sandwich is ready.  In fact, I'm pretty sure this will publicity stunt backfire and hurt business.  Yeah, there will be some tourists who want to eat from “that sandwich place that was on after Sarah Palin's Alaska,” but most normal people who actually live in the city won't be interested in having a camera pointed in their face every time they want to order a $10 sandwich before getting high in the park.

[hat tip The Bay Citizen]

The New York Times reported last week that Sit/Lie, which was marketed as a measure to clean up Haight St. and improve business, has actually harmed Haight commerce:

The antivagrancy measure, which passed with 53 percent of the vote in November, has yet to be enforced in a significant way. The police began issuing citations only last month.

But the Haight has already felt the impact. Many believe that months of relentless, negative news coverage that painted the neighborhood as a war zone where gangs of young street thugs preyed on innocent pedestrians was a public relations debacle.

“The publicity definitely hurt us,” said Jimmy Siegel, owner of Distractions, a Victorian steampunk clothing and head shop, which has operated on Haight Street for 35 years. “My business went down $100,000 last year.”

Read on.

I've been following the progress of upstart cheese shop Mission Cheese for some time now, mostly because the closing of Delano's has left a hole in the Mission cheese market and I need more ways to prove that I'm an upwardly-mobile caucasian.  So the other day when the shop published a headline on their blog titled “Chair Party (HOORAY!) & Budget Woes (NOOO!)”, I immediately became concerned that my dream of purchasing delicious cheese paired with a fine bottle of wine on the same block of Valencia Street as $250 custom jeans, $750 custom bicycles, $3.50 internet coffee, and gourmet children's toys was in peril.

Turns out the cheese is clever.  Rather than going down the traditional route of obtaining a bank loan or bringing on a new investor to help fill their $12k budget hole, the for-profit Mission Cheese just assumed suckers on the internet would give them money.  They slapped a page up on IndieGoGo, a service that looks almost identical to Kickstarter, and sure enough, 74 people gave them over eight grand in a few days.

Mission Cheese certainly didn't scam anyone.  They don't pretend to be a charitable business, nor do they claim they'll repay that money as Mission Street Food did.  They just want the cash so they can get their doors open and people are completely willing to give private business their money for almost nothing in return.

At first this approach bothered me since it struck me as abusing people's charity; but the more I think about it, the more I love it.  Under this model, it'd be really easy for me to open a bar in SF as I wouldn't have to worry about repaying loans or losing investor's money. I could just buy the decor from a closing Red Lobster, import it into a space in the Mission and call it “Mission Boat Club.” Serve Mission-approved beverages such as 24s of PBR, Four Loko mimosas, Cisco, Colt 45 Blast, 40s of OE, Boone's Farms, Andre on ice, and Big Daddy IPA on tap.  The grill would serve nothing but sweet potato fries, onion rings, tatter tots, seitan hot wings, deep-fried pickles, mashed potatoes, Totino's frozen pizza, and slices of ice cream cake.  And there would be a mechanical bull.  Potential investors would ask me for a business plan and I'd tell them they just read it.  They'd nod their head in approval then the internet would write me a fat check for $75k.

Who's in?

Outrage!  Mission Local reports that come the first of 2012, Rainbow is getting rid of the 10% discount afforded to SFBC members.  Which, you know, is probably going to cost SFBC a third of their members and a few thousand people a couple hundred extra bucks on produce, vitamins, and adorable ferret calendars.

Why ditch the discount?:

“Our goal with the discount was to help broaden the membership of the SFBC,” says Mason, who handles public relations for the cooperative. The thing that ultimately drove the decision to eliminate the discount, he says, was when the SFBC realized how much money Rainbow was giving away through the discount in relation to how much the SFBC was getting through signing up new members. “They said, ‘Wow. If you just gave that to us, just think of how much more we could do for cycling in the city,’” recalls Mason. [..]

Another rationale behind the discount, Mason says, was to alleviate Rainbow’s parking crunch. The store did wind up having to double the number of bike racks in its space, but it’s still a struggle to find a spot. And while the SFBC and occasional Rainbow cashiers did maintain that people needed to ride their bikes to the store to use the discount, Mason says that biking to the store — or even biking, period — was never a requirement. “It was never about having to show your U-lock or your helmet or whatever. It was really just about broadening their membership.”

I understand their reason (“we can better finacially support SFBC by donating a percent of sales directly”), but I struggle to see how ending this discount will do the Bike Coalition any good.  Most of my friends who were on the fence about joining the org inevitably joined because of the discount.  But hey, between this and ending coupon day, I'm sure this was less about SFBC and more about earning more off your everyday bulk flax purchases.

[Mission Local | photo by shmooth]