In San Francisco, a city always looking for an excuse to grab a drink or throw a party, your local corner storeowner may know more about your habits than your close friends, boyfriends, girlfriends, coworkers, and classmates.
While living in a city stacked on top of each other like sardines, every resident has their own favorite around the corner store they visit to get last minute ingredients, wine for the evening, toilet paper, or an ice cream bar on a hot day.
During an evening with friends, Piper Robbins, 22, decides to make a liquor store run. Her and her friends start walking down the street toward the nearest corner store. Robbins walks on by, “not that one,” she says. “I’ve been in there three times this week to buy beer, we should go to a different one, the guy is going to think I’m an alcoholic,” she says.
“Ha! I know what you mean,” says Nicole Talahi, 25. “My corner store guy must think I’m so hormonal, I only go in there like once a month to buy myself chocolate.”
“Mine must think I’m a total hypochondriac, I go in there once a week to buy tissues, juice, and sanitizer,” says Lynley Frey, 29.
They are the people we never think about, yet they are the people we see all the time. They may know more details about our lives than the people in our lives. They know everything from what we are doing on a Saturday night, to when we are sick, to out eating habits, and yet we know nothing about them.
So, who are they?
A majority of the corner storeowners in San Francisco are Palestinian immigrants. After the British Mandate in 1948 that split Palestine into two territories, there was a large growth in the amount of Palestinians that immigrated to the United States.
Among the cities they immigrated to, Detroit, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, San Diego and Cleveland became popular destinations for them. It is estimated there are around 150,000 Arab Americans living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
“The Palestinian community in San Francisco has got a monopoly on this place,” says Mike Ruiz, a taxi driver in San Francisco for the past 10 years. “They own all the corner stores, drive all the taxi’s, and they ain’t scared of nothing. They know how to run a business and they all help each other out… smart people.”
They have become successful owners of restaurants, corner stores and other small businesses.
Today in San Francisco, there are over 300 convenient stores. In the Mission District alone, three of every five corner stores are owned by Palestinians.
