Veganism is Americanism with its sleeves rolled.

Okay, so they're just going by the name Pinko's Vegan Mercantile and, peace signs aside, one must assume the owners of this nascent establishment (pictured above) are neither communist nor socialist nor hippies nor dirty.  But they are vegan and have oodles of foodstuffs and other vegan doodads to sell you.

Beginning May 1st, the duo will be selling vintage vegan merch out of their new shop at 111 Valencia (just up the street from Zeitgeist) in anticipation of a larger vegan grocery to open at a later date in the same locale--a venerable challenge to the vegetarian Rainbow Grocery; often a thorn in the side of SF vegans, as they can be quite slow to adopt tasty new vegan food products.

From Pinko's official Facebook announcement:

I'm super, dooper, ridiculously excited to FINALLY announce that my favorite person, Rod Middleton, and I are FINALLY opening a lil' vegan shoppe!! It's called Pinko's Vegan Mercantile, because we're pinkos and we're vegan and we have stuff to sell! In all the years we've been vegan, we've been utterly confused by the fact that the San Francisco Bay Area was lacking its own exclusively vegan shoppe. We've FINALLY decided we just cannot take it anymore, so we're making it happen! Much to our delight (and surprise) everyone that we've told (mostly non-vegans) has been incredibly excited, supportive, encouraging, and confident about the sure success of the shop. It seems people agree with us about now being a really good time for this idea to have FINALLY hatched. [...]

Pinko's Vegan Mercantile is going to take a little time to pull together, so when we take occupancy on May 1st, we're going to bring in assorted vintage merchandise we've been buying, selling, and collecting for years. We'll run Pinko's Vintage Pop-Up Shop while we get everything set up for the Mercantile's official opening. All proceeds from the Pop-Up Shop will go directly to building the Vegan Mercantile. So please come by, shop, introduce yourselves, tell us what you'd like from your local vegan shoppe, and spread the word!

Great news!  How's it being received?

Oh, and it looks like our front gate (the one we're standing in front of in the pic above) was tagged since we were last here. Nice big black letters covering the whole thing. I hope it wasn't a meat-loving hater that saw our news and decided to welcome us to the 'hood. Oh well, paint isn't too expensive, right?

Oh.

[via Vegansaurus!]