I find this strategy... questionable.
However, I do pay him quite a lot of money to Know Things, so for now, instead of writing about the things that I actually care about and that actually matter (for example, the hell I've been going through for the last couple of months), instead I'll just share with you some inconsequential cattiness and jealousy.
Ok?
So you may have heard of this jazz club called Yoshi's. They've had a place on Fillmore for a year and a half or so. Well gosh, it turns out that they had kind of a hard time last year! Their business was a bit down from their expectations, you see, what with the recession and all. So the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency just gave them a $1.5 million "emergency" loan!
That's on top of the $6 million in loans they had already given them.
Back up. They were open for a year and a half. In that time they managed to burn through six million dollars. Then they came back to the City and said "Hey Buddy, can you spare another million and a half?"
I'm struggling for my life here, and my city government just gave another nightclub seven and a half million dollars.
Clearly I'm doing something wrong.
I don't really like to talk about how much money I've lost on this place, because frankly it's embarassing, but let's just say that in the ten years I've been sinking money into this hole, I have not even come close to what they accomplished in a year and a half.
On the one hand, maybe that means I'm better at this than I thought.
On the other hand, I spent my own money on it. And they also spent my money on it! And yours, dear taxpayer.
I did some rough math, and I think that for $7M, we could have been exactly where we are today except we could have had free admission for every event we've ever done over the last eight years.
So yeah, I'm just a little bitter and jealous. Just a little.
I try to avoid talking smack about other clubs, because nobody in this business has it easy, and we all need to work together. I've never been to Yoshi's, I don't know the owners, and I have nothing against them personally.
But come on. Where's my fucking bailout?
