The owner of San Francisco’s iconic Gump’s luxury department store blasted the Golden State’s top Democrats, including Governor Gavin Newsom, in a full-page ad in The San Francisco Chronicle that claims the crime-ridden, drug-infested city suffers from a “tyranny of the minority.”
The advertisement, an open letter from Gump’s CEO John Chachas, was addressed to Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and the city’s Board of Supervisors.
In the letter, Chachas notes that his historic store has been a prominent part of San Francisco “for more than 165 years.”
“Today, as we prepare for our 166th holiday season at 250 Port Street, we fear this may be our last because of the profound erosion of this city’s current conditions,” he wrote. “San Francisco now suffers from a ‘tyranny of the minority’ —behavior and actions of the few that jeopardize the livelihood of the many.”
Speaking the truth to power and hearing crickets in response from those in power and the media…the more quiet majority stand with you John Chachas and Gump’s. pic.twitter.com/TyO5rZH3K6
— Peter Christodoulo (@PeterChristod10) August 14, 2023
“The ramifications of COVID policies advising people to abandon their offices are only beginning to be understood,” the CEO continued. “Equally devastating have been a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets.”
“Such abject disregard for civilized conduct makes San Francisco unlivable for its residents, unsafe for our employees, and unwelcoming to visitors from around the world,” he stated.
The drive to write the letter “accumulated over many, many months,” Chachas told Fox News Digital.
“What motivated me to write the letter,” he explained, “was a belief that, until public sentiment was publicly discussed, you would not see any change in the behavior of elected officials because they seem incapable of coming to grips with some fairly basic realities.”
“I have a wonderful company with wonderful people who are deeply committed to it. And we live in a city that’s not functioning and it’s getting worse and worse and worse,” he continued. “And Governor Newsom and Mayor Breed and the city supervisors seem either incapable of understanding it or unwilling to actually make the policy changes that are needed to make it a workable environment.”
“It’s sort of lunacy to live in an environment where you go to work every day or people go to work and customers can’t come to your store,” he added. “I mean, that’s not a normal operating environment.”
(Video: Fox News Digital)
He challenged Mayor Breed to “swap jobs” with him for “180 days.”
“I’ll let her run Gump’s for 180 days. She can let me run the city for 180 days, and we’ll see how we do. I’ll take a dollar as my salary,” Chachas said. “I doubt anybody’s going to take me up on that, but that would be kind of interesting… You’d see a lot of change in 180 days, I can tell you that.”
He said he’s been waiting for a plan from Newsom to deal with the city’s empty office buildings.
“You have 25 million square feet of empty office space in San Francisco. I keep waiting for the governor to come out with a plan to induce people back to their offices, which is what every governor in the country should be doing, it’s what the federal government should be doing, what every state government should be doing,” he said. “And instead, everybody just keeps talking about it in veiled terms like it’s somehow not an issue.”
“It is a gigantic issue for businesses,” he stated. “Gigantic.”
Offering tax incentives for those businesses that require their employees to actually show up in person to work five days a week would be a good start, according to Chachas, as would doubling police presence and enforcing city ordinances that are already on the books.
“This isn’t a mystery. It’s not complicated,” he said. “You can be a rhesus monkey and actually look at the facts and know exactly what people have done.”
The CEO was happy to call out Newsom and Breed by name in his full-page ad because “they’re responsible” for San Francisco’s demise.
“They’re responsible,” he said. “She’s the second highest-paid mayor in the United States. He’s a high-paid governor of one of the most important states in the United States. They have responsibility for the cities in which they serve. If they don’t want the responsibility, they should resign, find a different job.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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