Storied San Francisco retailer Gump's files for bankruptcy

Storied San Francisco retailer Gump's files for bankruptcyPhoto: Gump's/Yelp
Camden Avery
Published on August 10, 2018

After 157 years in business, Gump's may be facing the end of its days after a bankruptcy filing, the Chronicle reports

Gump's—a retail institution known to Bay Area natives as the kind of place where their grandmothers, or great grandmothers, used to shop—has specialized for generations in luxury housewares and jewelry, with a bent towards Japanese and Chinese imports.

And it's a store that has left its legacy elsewhere in San Francisco: the bronze Buddha sculpture in Golden Gate Park's Japanese Tea Garden was donated by the Gump family in 1949 after being in the store since the late 1920s.

Though the business has been available for sale since May, it's been losing money steadily—on the order of $5 million a year for the past two years—as the luxury retail market shifts around it, the Chronicle states. The company filed Sunday for bankruptcy with plans for a liquidation sale before the end of the calendar year.

Without a last-minute capital infusion or outright sale, Gump's may go the way of other legendary San Francisco retailers of yore, like I. Magnin and City of Paris.

The store's offerings are currently discounted 20 to 40 percent off.