Payment processing company Square will launch a business and community hub next week called “The Corner Store” at the long-shuttered Lucca Ravioli Co. location on Valencia Street.
Where customers once might have encountered an Italian-American meatcutter operating an antique brass cash register at Lucca, soon business owners will be able to purchase a flashy “Square Handheld” device to process their payments “right from their pocket.”
The new space at 22nd and Valencia will be a business resource center during the day, where local business owners can purchase Square products and consult with Square employees, like a mini Apple store. In the evenings, it will become a community hub for business-related events.
Several events are already on the Corner Store’s calendar, often with food and drinks available: Panels on starting a business in the Mission, a neighborhood night with music and drinks, events with companies like OpenTable and Sysco.
“In 2024, Square processed more than 20,000 transactions per day in the Mission,” a Square spokesperson said in a statement. “The Corner Store further demonstrates Square’s commitment to fostering lasting relationships within the local business community.”
The events are intended to “strengthen neighborhood connections, provide practical education, offer industry-specific insights, and support business growth,” according to the announcement.
The pop-up is temporary, with events only running through June. Square spokesperson Katie Dally McMains suggested the concept, which will be Square’s first, could be extended for a longer period, or even reproduced elsewhere.
For now, the site, which has had its share of issues in recent years, is currently listed as available to rent.
The owners sold the Lucca Ravioli building in 2019 for some $7 million and closed the beloved Italian deli and market they had run for more than 90 years. Since then, it has been a studio space for a man, Rory Lydon, working on a laptop, exasperating neighbors as he ripped up the interior of the 1,250 square-foot space for an artist studio that never came to fruition.
After a police chase sent a San Francisco police cruiser cruising into the facade of the building nearly two years ago, and narrowly missed hitting a small child, the landlord said Lyndon didn’t return, and the space has slowly been rebuilt.
The front of the building had to be replaced due to the police-chase damages, said landlord Ted Plant, and the interior changes made by the prior tenant had to be fixed.
Plant said repairs were just recently completed, and that he is looking forward to the new tenant. “It’s a really nice corner,” he said, “so I think it’ll work well for them.”
This story was updated with a comment from a Square spokesperson.
What a lame replacement
SERIOUSLY tone deaf transplant type sh!t.
Somehow I’m thinking this won’t square with local residents. Lucca was neighborhood and citywide serving. Square not so much. Anyone can Square online……no brick & mortar neccessary.
Yawwn.
Another ‘tech lounge’ but cutely wrapped in the twee name “Corner Shop”.
so sad and dumb. It’s one thing to have tech people make a bunch of lame and expensive restaurants. It’s even worse when classic local spots just become a useless tech space for tech to sell tech to tech. Is the lameness the point? Do these people want to make the city a hollow wasteland? No one needs this.
Not going to say I like this development, but it’s not for “selling tech to tech”. It’s for selling tech to restaurants, and to other small businesses that sell things in person — in short, to the kind of businesses that are Square’s customers.
One way you can tell it’s for restaurants is the two events mentioned: they’re with OpenTable and Sysco. Like Square, those sell mainly to restaurants. Sysco isn’t even tech: they sell restaurants the food the restaurants use to make the food you eat.
Once among the city’s most interesting streets, Valencia has become a bland, lame, gentrified, yuppified boutique of a joke. Now with boba and cryotherapy! I give you Techie, Slayer of Culture.
Gross.
Do they not know that there’s already a fairly popular business called “The Korner Store” just down Mission in the Excelsior?