Valencia Street’s former Lucca Ravioli space will now be handling a different kind of dough, as the point-of-sale system Square is taking the place over and turning it into something like an Apple Store for their own products.
The longtime Lucca Ravioli location at 1100 Valencia Street had belonged to the Italian-American grocer and Italian goods importer for 94 years, until its closure in 2019. The space then became one eccentric tenant’s attempt to turn it into an art space that never materialized, and then the site of a brutal police chase car crash, and after that, the magnet for graffiti seen above.
But now the cloud-based point-of-sale system Square will be the shape of things to come at the former Lucca Ravioli. Mission Local broke the news late Wednesday that the storefront will be home to a new pop-up “Corner Store” for Square products, sort of like an Apple Store but for products from the Jack Dorsey co-founded Square.
The store’s launch party is scheduled for this Tuesday, May 27, so this is all happening quickly. The opening comes on the heels of last week’s launch of the new Square Handheld device, so that figures to feature prominently in the store’s offerings. The shop will also apparently offer consultations and advice on that and other existing Square products.
“In 2024, Square processed more than 20,000 transactions per day in the Mission,” a Square spokesperson said in a statement to Mission Local. “The Corner Store further demonstrates Square’s commitment to fostering lasting relationships within the local business community.”
It will be a store by day, but by night will host “a series of community events,” according to the Chronicle. That paper says that those events will highlight “topics ranging from AI for small business to the immigrant stories that helped shape the Mission.”
Those seem like… very different topics.
Having used Square myself in a food and beverage service capacity, it was always my gripe that the platform seemed designed by highly paid engineers who’d never worked a service job in their lives. So a source of advice, or an avenue to give feedback to a company representative, will surely be a welcome development for Square users and business owners.
And here we have a tech company offering actual human customer support instead of frustrating AI chatbot garbage, so we will absolutely acknowledge Square for adding the human touch. But perhaps most importantly, the Square Corner Store will fill a spot, albeit temporarily, that’s been vacant and blighted for the last six years, which is a definite win for Valencia Street at large.
It's not clear how long this pop-up installation will last.
Image: Joe Kukura
