Jing Chen would like to open a gift shop on Clement Street. A group of neighborhood merchants are trying to stop her.
On Thursday, Sept. 24, the city’s planning commission will vote on whether to allow an outpost of Chen’s Therapy Stores, which city planners have said qualifies as a formula retail chain, to open at 32 Clement St. near Second Avenue.
The high-foot traffic, small-business-dominated Clement Street corridor already has enough Jellycat plush toys, whimsical baby onesies and magnets with sassy slogans, members of the Clement Street Merchants Association argue.
Fliers reading “No formula retail on Clement Street” hang in many store windows from 10th Avenue to Arguello Boulevard. A petition on change.org urging the planning commission to deny Therapy Stores’ conditional use application has over 300 signatures.
The association would be delighted if a chain pharmacy reopened in the neighborhood’s long-vacant Walgreens, said its president, Chris Squire. But Clement is not in want of gift shops. “There’s a lot that fills that niche in the neighborhood,” he said.
In the association’s favor: Therapy Stores — which Chen started 32 years ago with a single storefront in the Mission — currently occupies 10 locations. Clement Street, like many of the city’s neighborhood corridors, has restrictions designed to support independently owned businesses.
Chain stores must file for a special permit before getting approval from the city to open. The city’s definition of a chain is a business with 11 or more locations, anywhere in the world.
In Chen’s favor: The planning department. Staffers there compiled an 83-page document in preparation for Thursday’s hearing. That report’s recommendation: Approve.
The Clement Street Therapy has been underway for months. Chen bought the 32 Clement St. building in December 2025 for nearly $2 million and registered her business there that month.
But Alissa Anderson, who owns the gift store Foggy Notion at 124 Clement St. — one block away from the proposed Therapy location — said she and the other neighborhood merchants didn’t learn of Therapy’s size until Mission Local reported the opening of its eleventh location in the Inner Sunset (one location has since shuttered, bringing the total back to 10).
Chen needed to apply for a conditional-use permit as a chain if she wanted to open on Clement Street. There was no sign that she had filed for such a permit. The merchants complained to the city.
In April, the city’s planning department stuck 32 Clement St. with a notice of three planning-code violations, including one related to the storefront’s zoning: Because it had been an eyeglass store, the storefront was most recently zoned as a medical office, not a retail store.
In the notice, the planning department informed Chen that she would need a conditional-use authorization to convert the storefront to a formula retail chain outpost.
Chen filed for the authorization in May.
Thursday will not be Chen’s first conditional-use rodeo: In 2020, she reportedly received a permit from the city of Placerville, California, after buying a building there and meeting resistance from locals over concerns that, as a store with several locations, Therapy could buy in bulk and undercut other gift shops in the area on price.
That location was approved, but has since shuttered.
Chen posted a heartfelt 800-word statement on Instagram Monday, in an apparent response to the merchants’ petition.
In the post, Chen asked supporters of the store to email Manushi Mathur, the planner assigned to the case, on her behalf, and detailed her journey from emigrating from Guangzhou, China at the age of 18, to working at the Japantown Burger King, to opening the first Therapy on Guerrero Street with just $40 between herself and her then-partner.
In Squire’s view, Chen has not been “forthright about how many stores they operate,” so as to fall below the formula retail threshold. The unpermitted construction at 32 Clement, he said, suggests Chen has not been “following basic rules that the rest of us as small business owners have to operate by.”
Other nearby vacant storefronts had already been zoned for retail, he added, making her unpermitted changes to 32 Clement St. all the more unnecessary.
Chen denied trying to skirt the law.
“I made a mistake and moved too quickly to open the store without understanding the required approval process,” she wrote in a statement to Mission Local. “I understand why that upset people, and have since followed planning department requirements.”
“My desire is to bring more jobs and quality goods to Clement Street,” Chen continued, “and to strive to be a good neighbor.”
She seems like a nice lady. But if you have 9 retail locations and you spent $2M on real estate to open location 10 then your origin story is no longer a persuasive reason to cut you a break, in my opinion.
I am endlessly sympathetic to the hurdles and humps that go into business operations in the City – that being said, these sorts of gift emporiums, “vintage” pop-ups (see: most of the businesses that have opened on upper Haight St since the pandemic) and the like always seem to struggle less than businesses that offer more beneficial services.
I remember how many flaming, knife-studded hoops Carlos and Alicia of CS Jiu Jitsu had to jump through to try and get their dojo on Divis opened back in 2018-2019, but all the byzantine bureaucracy took so much time and money that the brick and mortar location didn’t pan out, and now they teach lessons out of a sprinter van.
lol quality goods.
Way to take down a local businesswoman by comparing her to a national chain store. “But we want CVS” cried her competition…
Clement Street has an urgent need for more stores that prioritize goods and services for neighborhood residents over quirky gifts. They already have stores that do what TS is looking to do in a true independent framework with a real focus on the neighborhood and its merchant community (i.e. Fleetwood, Foggy Notion, and others).
I also take a dim view of a lot of the sort of goodies these stores sell – many of them seem just like dropshipped dreck – mass produced to fulfill the desire for thoughtless consumerism.
Finally, it must be said, the inside of the sunset store *looks* temporary and greedy. Bare walls, everything on tables, sterile row lights and un-hidden AC ducting? Makes it feel like a more impersonal cash-grab sort of vibe.
Absolutely incredible that a gift shop, run by an immigrant woman who has lived in San Francisco for decades, must satisfy heaps of bureaucratic red tape and pacify angry neighbors because it is “formula retail” in the strictest technical sense—
While at the same time the city bends over backwards to accommodate its Nth AI startup, funded by Thiel and Andreessen’s endless war chests, owned and operated by a 24-year old “CEO” who has lived in San Francisco for 8 months (and pays $6,500 rent) which peddles useless middleware for agentic B2B SaaS enterprise transactions—
As ever, this city truly has its priorities straight.
Therapy did the same thing with their Berkeley (Elmwood) location. As an established independent store owner who carried a lot of the same brands, I contacted my suppliers when Therapy moved in and they asked Therapy not to carry the same products at that location. They readily agreed but just had the products shipped to another store and moved them to their College Ave location themselves. Merchants should beware of Therapy, they are not a good neighbor.
As someone who lives in the inner sunset, I was disappointed when the new Therapy Store opened up in the old Ace Hardware location that had been damaged from a fire. We already had a couple independent gift shops in the neighborhood, and Therapy’s addition felt totally unneeded and misaligned with the neighborhood’s actual needs. The store’s design and the products they sell are cheap, hollow, and lack value. Would love to see it go.
Hmm, tchotchke store owners want to keep new tchotchke competitor out in order to keep the prices of tchotchkes higher. Not a lot of sympathy from me.