Gentleman Joe’s Barbershop in downtown Phoenix has been offering men’s haircuts since the summer of 2007, but stands on the brink of shutting its doors for the last time.
Joseph Garcia, owner of the shop and two other Gentleman Joe’s locations, said rising rent costs and a downtown sector that simply fails to deliver business has forced him to choose not to renew the lease on their downtown storefront, located near Central Avenue and Adams Street.
“We have been there for three and a half years and have never made any money,” Garcia said. “That store put us $108,000 in the red that the other two Gentleman Joe’s stores have had to make up for.”
He said he was willing to operate at a loss for so long came because he wanted to be a part of the downtown area’s rejuvenation.
“We wanted to be part of the new growth downtown, but that never materialized,” Garcia said. “We’re only busy maybe three or four hours a day. It has never been what we thought it would be.”
Garcia said the owners of the storefront that Gentleman Joe’s occupies are searching for a new tenant, but the barbershop is going to occupy the location until a new tenant is found.
“They asked us how much they would have to lower the rent for us to break even,” Garcia said. “They lowered it, but at any point they could tell us they found a new tenant and we’d have to be out in 30 days.”
Adan Monreal has been manager for the location since it opened, and said it has been a struggle to get customers downtown, especially from the finance businesses that occupy the city’s most prominent buildings.
“There’s a thousand people in those towers, but we don’t see them,” Monreal said, referring to Wells Fargo and Chase Tower near Gentleman Joe’s. “They get in their cars when they’re done with work and take off home.”
He said that since the store’s grand opening in June 2007, when the shop offered free haircuts all day and was featured on Channel 10 with the mayor speaking about bringing downtown back to life, it has been slow going.
“There was another barbershop on Washington, a couple blocks away, when we first opened,” Monreal said. “But they took off like a month after we opened.”
Garcia said while he was looking at downtown as a possible place to open a barbershop, it had appeared to be a very lucrative location; the Walter Cronkite School was set to arrive at ASU’s Downtown campus, just blocks away. That meant more students, which meant more haircuts.
The Valley Metro Light Rail was also under construction, and was supposed to bring people from as far away as Mesa to the downtown area, with one stop just blocks away from the barbershop.
Monreal said that the location still looks like a good place to open a business. The CityScape project has been open less than a year, 44 Monroe, a condominium complex and Arizona’s tallest residential tower, recently opened and is accepting residents, and ASU’s law school is set to move to the Downtown campus in the near future.
Garcia said he is going to keep the store open as it breaks even. He said he enjoys providing the jobs for Monreal and the rest of the downtown shop’s employees, as well as the services to his customers.
Garcia said he is open to selling the shop as-is, but that the chances of finding a buyer are bleak.
“Anyone’s going to look at the financial history of our store and see we didn’t make any money in three and a half years,” he said. “Maybe a married couple with very little expenses could do it, but I don’t see that happening.”
Contact the reporter at liam.hausmann@asu.edu
