In 2023 John Chan gave away his pet store. He was 58, and he had spent more than 40 years at Pet Central, the family shop on Grant Avenue in San Francisco’s Chinatown that his father ran before him. He worked ten hours a day, six days a week, and by his own account had never taken so much as a couple of days of vacation.
He wanted to retire and spend more time with his family. In August 2023 he posted an ad on the Nextdoor app. It said the store was for sale, that the owner was retiring, and that he was looking for someone who loved animals and would take good care of his customers. Then it gave the price.
Asking price is $0.
The store was not completely free. Chan hoped to be paid back for the stock on the shelves. Past that, what he was asking for was a condition rather than a number.
“We’re not trying to make money off the pet store,” Chan told KPIX. “We want to make sure we find people with a good heart. That’s the most important thing.”
Andrew Brown, one of his regulars, said it was the end of an era. “I can only say this is very iconic of him,” he told the station.
After the first KPIX story aired, the responses came in faster than Chan could handle them. He said he got a hundred calls, texts and emails, and that he worked day and night answering questions. It spread locally at first, then to Texas and Missouri, then to people writing from Singapore and Canada. Nextdoor called to tell him his post had been their top post for a week.
In September 2023 he picked his successor. Christopher Blake, a former teamster, had come across the story while watching YouTube and went in with two friends who grew up in Chinatown. “I was YouTubing, and I saw CBS News had an article about John giving up the pets store for $0 and me and two other of good friends who grew up in Chinatown, we couldn’t let this place go,” Blake told KPIX. He used to come to the store with his father, who died during the pandemic, and he said keeping the place open was a way to honor him.
Chan said Blake and his partners were the right people. They were young, they had passion, and they all had animals, many of them bought at Pet Central. Blake described his first day as the owner this way.
I feel like Willy Wonka. I feel like I won the golden ticket.
The last thing the reporting records is Blake opening the doors and Chan planning his first vacation in 15 years. Neither article says anything past September 2023, and we did not find a follow-up.
What the price was actually for
Chan had something worth money and decided the right price was nothing. What he would not hand over casually was the part that had no price on it, the animals in the cages and the people who came in to buy for them. So he set the number at zero and spent weeks reading applications instead.
He gave away his pet store, but he did not hand it to whoever asked first. Nobody was short a pet store. There was no gap on the other end for Chan to close.
He had something he was finished with, and he took his time finding the hands he wanted it in. That is a different shape from a need being met, and it is the shape most giving actually takes.
A woman in Washington had the same problem on a much smaller scale when she had an extra seat at the ballpark and nobody to put in it. A store and a ticket have nothing in common except the question underneath both of them, which is how you find the right person. That question is what the Gifts side of MeetaNeed exists to answer.
Where this story comes from
Originally reported by CBS San Francisco / KPIX, reported by Itay Hod and updated August 22, 2023, with the follow-up report updated September 18, 2023. Retold here with the details as those reports give them.
