Despite being an SF legacy business, 60-year-old SF wine and spirits store The Jug Shop appears to have served its last drop, as its owner confirms the shop has been evicted from their Polk Gulch location.  

There are actually a few beer and wine stores on SF’s Legacy Business Registry, like Castro Village Wine Co. and Val de Cole Wines & Spirits. And the 60-year-old Polk Gulch beverage emporium The Jug Shop is also on that list, but was still forced to move from its former Polk Street location to a new location just a half-block away in 2021, because some condos were going up at the old location — which once had its own parking lot out front.

But despite the new location being so close to the old one, The Jug Shop’s GoFundMe campaign indicates that business fell through the floor after they moved.


This was apparently more unsustainable than anyone realized. The Chronicle reported Tuesday morning that The Jug Shop has been evicted from their newer location at 1648 Pacific Avenue. That report noted that "court documents show" The Jug Shop had been evicted over an alleged $170,000 in unpaid rent, with the Chronicle adding the store “now appears vacant, its shelves barren of the upscale wine and spirits for which it was known.”

Shortly after the Chron published their article, they heard back from co-owner Mike Priolo confirming the news.

“We would have loved things to work out differently and be able to continue our tradition as a San Francisco Legacy Business,” Priolo told the Chronicle. “Unfortunately, without funding required eviction was unavoidable.”

The eviction should maybe not have been a surprise. For months, the Jug Shop had been telling anyone who would listen that without the hundreds of thousands from a successful GoFundMe campaign, it would have to close. And that campaign had only raised a small fraction of its goal.

That GoFundMe was clear that business had cratered when the store moved just a half-block away in 2021. “Although this charming old fire house space is only a half block away,” the campaign said, “the smaller storefront with severely diminished visibility, foot traffic & no customer parking immediately decimated our sales revenue by 50% in the first month(s) and well beyond in the subsequent months and years.”

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Porsche C. via Yelp