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Barnes & Noble, BJ’s and Banks

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Let me start this thing by confessing. As a recovering Catholic, the shame-powered trip into that darkened booth, the ceremony and the unburdening of one’s soul has stayed with me even as I have managed to unwire at least some of the buttons installed by the clergy in my formative years.

One of my confessions is I love bookstores. It brings me no joy to report the passing of Barnes & Noble Booksellers at the Town Center in Corte Madera so that Arhaus, a furniture store, can take its place.

The bookstore’s lease was up and the folks running the mall thought a furniture store would be a larger draw. In recent years the Town Center has had a focus on products for the home in terms of their store mix. It recently added Anthem, another furniture store, to go with Ethan Allen and Crate & Barrel.

Barnes & Noble say they are on the hunt for another location in Marin, as it’s a good market for them and they hope to have a new location secured by the end of 2023.

Arhaus has 80 stores across the country. The Corte Madera planning commission is currently making the chain jump through some hoops over project design as well as energy use.

Staying with the mall theme for just a moment we head north on 101 for the Northgate Mall in San Rafael where BJ’s Brewhouse and Restaurant is calling it quits. The eatery employed 90 until it closed April 12. It served from a massive menu only slightly smaller than War and Peace. It focused on fast casual pub fare and had a full bar and plenty of suds for the craft beer crowd.

Another confession I have is that I dined at BJ’s on occasion with my wife and friends as it was close to our condo. It was a good place to catch a ballgame.

BJ’s has 11 other locations in the Bay Area. What Northgate will do with the space vacated by the brewery is a mystery at this point.

Your Marin Moment

There is a well-meaning but sometimes misplaced idea in journalism that every story has a local angle. The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is an example. The failure of the bank, which had plenty of clients in the North Bay, has prompted a bunch of stories and no doubt more are on the way.

The fact is that I’ll be writing one for this very magazine in the not-too-distant future on how the failure took place and how it will impact the wine industry. So that is kind of a confession. Here is another, I wrote about the failure of Tamalpais Bank in Marin for this very magazine.

In the meantime, it’s interesting how the failure of a bank in Santa Clara can prompt worries as far away as the United Kingdom and India.

Or right here in the North Bay.

SVB, as it was known in Tech Land, is regarded as a small bank even though it was the 16th largest bank in the country. It went from shopping for $2.25 billion in fresh capital on a Wednesday to having guys in federal windbreakers walk in on Friday and bolt the doors.

Tim Myers, CEO of Bank of Marin, has been quoted as saying he didn’t believe SVB’s issues were indicative of those at other banks. This comment came three days before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized Signature Bank in New York.

That said, First Republic Bank, with four locations in the North Bay, saw 60% of its public value disappear on a March afternoon as a result of panic in the small bank sector.

Fear is a powerful force in the financial markets. So is speed.

While we are learning more each day about what brought SVB to its knees, here are a couple things to note in the early going. On that Wednesday I got a note from a source saying that the bank was shopping for new capital and selling shares. In the meantime, venture capital firms began distributing emails advising their clients to pull money out of SVB—many of the same clients that SVB had made loans to and helped in the early going of those companies.

Eat your young much?

Those companies did indeed begin pulling deposits out and in very short order the run was on.

SVB was by no means a pure victim, the bank had genuine balance sheet woes and a substantial gap between its asset values and its need for capital. But the distance between selling stock and locking the doors proved to be much shorter than even SVB insiders understood.

 

 

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