Gilroy City Administrator Jay Baksa made the right decision when
he ruled that 5-Day Furniture Warehouse is violating its business
license by conducting retail sales at its warehouse facility.
Gilroy City Administrator Jay Baksa made the right decision when he ruled that 5-Day Furniture Warehouse is violating its business license by conducting retail sales at its warehouse facility.
When the furniture company’s owners approached the city for a license to operate in a 162,000-square-foot warehouse at 500 E. Luchessa Ave., an area zoned for industrial, not retail, businesses, they said retail sales would be an ancillary part of their main business – furniture wholesaling and storage.
Following complaints – Gilroy officials refuse to divulge who blew the whistle – the city began an investigation and found that by almost every measure, the business was primarily retail in nature.
“To use an old saying, ‘If it walks like a duck, it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it must be a duck,'” Baksa, acting as hearing officer for the business license complaint, wrote in his decision.
The store advertised itself as “the region’s largest furniture store,” opened its warehouse facility to the general public, and 5-Day’s retail sales by far exceeded its wholesale sales in January and February of this year.
Accordingly, Baksa limited 5-Day’s retail sales events to four three-day weekend sales each calendar year.
5-Day Furniture Warehouse is an exciting addition to the Gilroy business landscape and we hope they can find a way to sell their furniture to the public at an appropriate – read retail-zoned – location. It sounds like its owners might be on the way to that conclusion; co-owner Hai Tran said he’s going to be supplying furniture to a new gallery-style furniture store planned for near Monterey and Tenth streets – close to long-established Rosso’s Furniture. And we would expect that Gilroy’s Economic Development Director Bill Lindsteadt would be in close contact with Mr. Tran. A business that generates that much revenue in such a short period of time is an attractive one not only for area consumers but for city sales tax revenue. Maybe economic incentives are appropriate in order to convince 5-Day Furniture to stay in Gilroy?
It is well within the city’s purview to control land usage. It’s good for Gilroy citizens – for traffic and public safety reasons, for example – for retail activities to occur in places zoned for retail sales, and for those businesses to meet the parking and other codes established for retailers.
It’s also only fair to other retailers in town for all retailers – whether or not they use the word “warehouse” in their name – to play by the same rules.
