The 1,300-store chain Club Pilates was hoping to swoop into a Valencia Street storefront that’s been vacant for a year and a half. The SF Planning Commission still deemed this formula retail, and rejected their bid.

It seemed like there might be a thaw in San Francisco’s well-known formula retail ban that discourages large chain businesses from many neighborhoods. After all, the SF Board of Supervisors voted to allow formula retail on Van Ness Avenue in April of this year, and the 2021 controversy over an El Farolito in North Beach seemed to at least galvanize the late-night burrito-eating demographic into a more favorable view of formula retail storefronts.

But we saw a test of how SF currently feels about formula retail over the last month. Mission Local reported about two weeks ago that a 1,300-store pilates studio chain called Club Pilates was trying to open on Valencia Street, in the storefront that had most recently been the women's apparel shop Audrey. Valencia corridor shop owners were united against the idea, particularly with the locally owned EHS Pilates just four blocks down the street.

It all came before the SF Planning Commission at their meeting this past Thursday. And the Chronicle reports that the commission denied the request for a permit at that meeting, finding the chain with well over 1,000 locations to definitely be the kind of formula retail that many on Valencia Street don’t want.

The pilates studio’s prospective owners, Carrie Wu and CJ Liu, argued that while they do operate under the Club Pilates brand and logo, they would have been an independently owned and operated studio.

“This is not our first location. We have one in Diamond Heights, [one] in NoPa that we both got through the permit process pretty smoothly,” Liu told the Chronicle. “So we just thought this Valencia Street, as long as it’s welcomed formula retail, then we thought it was going to be an easy case. It’s just going through the formality.”

But at the same time, most McDonald’s and Burger King locations in SF are also independently owned and operated by local franchisees. They still operate with Burger King and McDonald’s signage and color schemes. And in that sense, large franchises still rub some Valencia Street small business owners the wrong way.

“It’s about building a brand on Valencia and taking it out into the world. It’s not taking a national brand or international brand and bringing it to Valencia,” Valencia Street’s Hi-Hat pizza shop owner Ron Elder told Mission Local.

There is of course the suspicion that landlords would prefer to hold out for megabucks national chains rather than rent to homegrown local businesses, and intentionally hold properties for better-funded, bigger players. But according to the Chronicle, the storefront’s owner Molly Fong was not pleased with the prospects that were showing interest in the space, which the Chron says included "a cannabis and vape shop."

“I was very disappointed as an owner,” Fong told the Chronicle after the vote. “It’s so hard to find a tenant. Now, you find a tenant, they tell you they don’t want it because it’s not a small store.”

That said, this may not be the end of the saga for a Club Pilates possibly opening on Valencia Street. Mission Local notes that the studio’s proprietors can still appeal the decision to the full SF Board of Supervisors.

Related: The Removal of the Formula Retail Ban on Van Ness Just Got One Step Closer to Reality [SFist]

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