His wife’s chocolate chip cookies sit in a basket on the check-out counter. A faded magazine clipping of him and his three sons is tacked up between shelves of liquor. A sign outside encourages anyone who is hungry to inquire within, where a special rack of assorted foods is available for those in need.
For Imad Shaheen, owner of Key Food Market in the Lower Haight, it all comes down to caring for his people.
“It’s a community, more than just a business,” Shaheen said, speaking from behind the counter at his shop on the corner of Fillmore and Oak streets. “It started like just a business operation, but now you know everybody by name, know their family, know their stories … so it becomes a mixture of business and friendship.”
Neighbors come to the shop to celebrate their birthdays, play a tune when a piano is set up on the sidewalk, or sit in folding chairs to watch a movie projected on a screen facing the street. Handsome Major, an employee’s large German Shepherd, “shakes hands” across the counter with willing customers, a trait that has earned him Instagram fame with more than 50,000 followers.
As people filter in on a recent Wednesday afternoon, they chat with Shaheen. He refuses the mailman’s payment for a Dr. Pepper. He asks one couple how their move is going, and they ask if he sells locks for their U-Haul. He doesn’t, but he rummages in the back room to find one extra-long zip tie, and offers it to them for free.
“This one can do magic,” he proclaims. “The biggest zip tie you can ever find!”
And Shaheen gladly takes the mention of the photo on the shelf as an opportunity to brag about his wife, a schoolteacher who in addition to baking cookies, also loves photography.
“She takes pictures that she sends [to magazines] and they publish it,” he says, almost baffled with admiration, looking at the photo of himself and his three once-small children facing the open sea. “I love it because none of us are paying attention, we’re all looking at the frickin’ ocean.”
What magazine? He doesn’t remember, but his wife would.
For that matter, Shaheen doesn’t even remember the name of the person who sold him the shop some 30 years ago.
But the place has become his life — a long way from his initial plan to join “corporate America” as a new immigrant and even further from his roots in Palestine and Jordan, where most of his family still lives.
He was born in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, just before Israeli forces invaded in 1967 and his parents fled to Jordan, where his immediate family has remained. Shaheen came to San Francisco to “explore other options,” thinking he would go to college, spend a few years in the states, and move back to Jordan. That never happened. He stayed.
“I came for college, met my wife, fell in love, one thing after another I’m here,” Shaheen said happily. “And like I say, destiny, dude — you’re destined to meet someone who will tie you down.”
He goes back to Jordan every year; 15 years ago, he took his now adult children to Palestine.
“I told them how as an American citizen, you’re treated differently than a Palestinian,” Shaheen said. “I had them go as Palestinians, like, ‘I want you to experience what people experience.’”
Shaheen described being forced to walk “like cattle” single-file through iron grated security checkpoints and questioned, knowing that Americans or Europeans could simply hop in a cab and drive through. Shaheen’s voice grows incredulous as he reflects on a homeland he never got to know.
“From here to Haight, as a Palestinian, might take you about five hours,” Shaheen says, standing in his shop two blocks north. “It will take me and you … as a non-Palestinian, it will take you five minutes.”
For now, Shaheen just makes the best of things where he can. He has found his niche here, moved to the suburbs to raise his children who are now in their 20s, and continues operating a beloved community space as the city evolves around him.
Where some are inclined to bemoan change or a purported doom loop, Shaheen sees things differently.
“It does change every once in a while, but it’s always good. You always get good people somehow,” Shaheen said, stepping outside for a quick cigarette between customers. “Because it’s not the people who live [here], it’s just the relationship that you create with them.”
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