Set in San Francisco’s iconic Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, this video follows three small business voices — Dave McLean, the self-described “godfather of craft beer in San Francisco,” and Kristen Evans and Camden of The Booksmith, a beloved independent bookstore founded in 1976. Each shares their personal journey of building a life and livelihood in a neighborhood steeped in counterculture history, while grappling with the very real pressures of rising costs, razor-thin margins, and the challenge of taking care of their employees.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Haight-Ashbury, perhaps the most iconic neighborhood in San Francisco, made famous by the hippie revolutionaries of the Summer of Love and legendary musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and of course, the Grateful Dead. I sat down with a few local entrepreneurs to learn more about the Haight and its current state. Dave McLean has been referred to by some as the godfather of craft beer in San Francisco.
He originally made his pilgrimage here to follow the Grateful Dead and soon found the Haight to be the perfect place to combine his love for music with his passion for brewing.
Dave McLean, Magnolia Brewing Company
Well, the Haight’s had lots of histories, not just one, you know. I mean, it goes back to being a playground for the rest of San Francisco in the 1880s or 90s when the park was first built. This neighborhood has always been kind of a festive neighborhood where people have come.
Its most famous era and incarnation was in the 60s when a bunch of hippies were living here and there was a community that formed around them. It’s always been changing, but then there’s a strangeness to it where the more it changes, the more it kind of stays the same, too.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
What’s your history in the area? I know you moved here in 91, but what’s your history here?
Dave McLean, Magnolia Brewing Company
I moved out here from the East Coast largely to see more Grateful Dead shows. At the same time, I ended up also falling in love with beer, with craft beer, and the two aren’t completely separate. There was an underground lot scene in the parking lot of Dead shows, and there were a lot of really good beers being sold there because they weren’t mass-produced beers.
I really wanted to create things that I hoped would last and ideally outlast me and that were really of the neighborhood and for the neighborhood, a real community. These were really just places that were meant to be true Haight-Ashbury neighborhood places.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
As an entrepreneur, as a business owner, you’re employing dozens of people. You’re providing jobs to these people that lived in and around the community.
Dave McLean, Magnolia Brewing Company
Yeah, absolutely. There’s some pressure there. Any mistake you make is not just going to affect you.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Did you think of it, the sense of community that exists here in Haight, the spirit of the Grateful Dead, they had their own ticket agency, own management. They took care of their employees. Did that kind of filter down to how you looked at your employees?
Dave McLean, Magnolia Brewing Company
To as much of a degree as possible, I tried to walk that talk. We did everything we could, I think, that was available to us at that time. We were early to offer health insurance before it was mandated and things like that.
Always trying, not always succeeding, but doing the best we could.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Part of your role now, you’re collaborating with so many other businesses throughout California. What do you think of some of the challenges in terms of offering retirement benefits for some of these employers?
Dave McLean, Magnolia Brewing Company
There’s been a lot of ebbing and flowing of different businesses, different business operators. The only problem is it’s just gotten harder to run those kinds of businesses because everything has gotten more expensive. It feels like there are a lot of expenses that can’t actually be curbed because they’re outside of our control.
Insurance and just the cost of labor. And then the margins aren’t really necessarily that great. Not only is it hard to come up with retirement plans for the staff, it’s often almost hard, if not impossible, for the founders to save any money for their own retirements.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
I can definitely hear the passion as you talk about it. Obviously it’s a challenge that needs to be addressed to be able to find a way to offer retirement for people in a cost-effective way, both to the employer and also to the employee.
Dave McLean, Magnolia Brewing Company
It makes me very happy and it’s kind of an honor to see Olympic go on as Olympic, looking and feeling very, very similar, doing kind of on a similar mission, doing all of the same things. I feel like it’s in really good hands.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Dave McLean, thank you so much for joining us.
Dave McLean, Magnolia Brewing Company
Thanks for having me.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Christin Evans and her husband are reimagining the notion of the independent bookstore, combining the power of community building and organization with smart business tactics. She and her employees are creating a model for how small business can still thrive in the face of anonymous online sales.
Christin Evans, The Booksmith
The Booksmith is a legacy bookstore in the Haight-Ashbury. It was founded in 1976 and it has 10 full-time equivalents that are working in the store. Most of them have just come out of high school or college and are working in a bookstore.
Sometimes it’s their first job. Haight-Ashbury is a destination for tourists from around the world, so we have folks that are visiting us throughout the summer and even throughout the year. We also have a local market that is changing with the rise of the technology companies.
We’re seeing more and more tech professionals move into the city and we’re seeing a lot of disruption to our long-term customer base.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Can you talk a little bit about how you kind of became energized around health care and then retirement?
Christin Evans, The Booksmith
So I met a group called Small Business Majority that was doing educational training around the Affordable Care Act. And then I had them come meet with the Haight-Ashbury merchants. The Affordable Care Act posed both an opportunity and challenge for businesses, right?
Because the opportunity was that their employees would receive health benefits, but the challenges were some of the businesses were struggling to pay minimum wages, let alone add on additional benefits.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
What are some of the challenges in offering a program like a health care program or a voluntary benefit?
Christin Evans, The Booksmith
Most of my staff are fairly young and they’re making at or just above minimum wage. They have high cost of living. San Francisco is not a cheap place to live.
Small businesses like mine and members of the Haight-Ashbury Merchants Association, almost all of them have fewer than 25 employees. And we know statistically 80% of small businesses do not offer a retirement savings plan to their employees. And the reason for that is what you alluded to.
There’s a fiduciary responsibility to the employer that a lot of owners don’t want to sign up for or necessarily are educated enough to understand what that actually means. And the default is that they don’t offer it. And so CalSavers is essentially a way to an easy entry point for businesses to enroll employees in a retirement savings program.
And it’s voluntary. The employees can opt out. It really makes it part of a culture of savings that allows employees to start thinking about their future.
CalSavers is simply just an automatic deduction from an employee’s paycheck.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
We’ve been talking to all different types of businesses, all different types of, you know, from an artist to a fireman and getting their experiences. I mean, people want to save. They recognize that it’s so vital to not only think about today and living today and taking care of your family or taking care of yourself or your dog or your little Joe, but they also take care of themselves in the future.
You obviously feel very strongly about everything here and feel very strongly about your employees. Christin Evans, thank you so much for joining us. And I appreciate your insight.
Thank you, Joe. Can I hug Paul?
Christin Evans, The Booksmith
Absolutely.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Fortunately, he doesn’t bite. Christin was very passionate about retirement. And I wanted to hear from one of her employees, Camden, about what he thought about retirement and saving.
You’ve been at the book since for about how long?
Camden, The Booksmith
For nine years. I graduated with, you know, fancy degree in English lit right around the time the market imploded. Got into book selling at the time because it was what was available, what made sense and had since found out that it’s a great career.
It works for me. I love it. San Francisco is a place where there’s so many different things going on that you can kind of plug into whatever your moment is, your scene is at any given time.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
What’s it like working on Hate Ashbury? There’s so much history.
Camden, The Booksmith
Oh, it’s wild. Yeah, no, it’s crazy. This is definitely one of the pockets in the city where the past is very much alive and present.
It’s kooky. It’s kind of like a circus.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
How did the experience of 2008 frame your thoughts about investing and the financial world?
Camden, The Booksmith
Apart from the fact that that that moment stripped a lot of financial opportunity off the table for people my age, but just sort of reiterated the importance of having some leverage into long term stability and long term financial health. It’s striking when you see your older generation like losing houses, losing jobs, like their careers derailed and not really like anything they can do about it.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Let’s fast forward into 2018. You’re the manager now of a group of employees. What does that mean to you in terms of the business that you’re in and you personally as a manager?
Camden, The Booksmith
Everyone knows that savings easier when it becomes habitual. It just gets the ball rolling and gives people a little bit of starting momentum. Cal Savers would be a way for the people that I work with to build a career and not give up any kind of financial security.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
This kind of provides a buoy, a lifeboat in a way for them to stabilize, get their feet set. Business owners and their employees value something unique in the hate. They enjoy preserving the storied history of its bohemian past while being resourceful to weather the economic ebbs and flows of tourism.
Today, as supersized brands crowd our attention with click of the button conveniences, it’s encouraging to see the nonconformist creative businesses and individuals can still survive on love and the hate.
