Angela Johnston

This past summer, Peet's Coffee, founded in Berkeley back in 1966, was purchased by a German Company for $1 billion. Over the last half-century, on its way to becoming a billion dollar company, Peet's helped launch the Bay Area craft coffee movement, spawning places like Four Barrel, Blue Bottle, Philz, and other independent coffee shops. Today, there's a wealth of coffee shops to be found, each with its own distinctive flavor and fans.

In 1969, Stephen Barncard’s first visit to San Francisco ended with a spontaneous visit to the Fillmore West.

“I’d never seen the Grateful Dead live before,” Barncard recalls. “I thought their records really were terrible sounding. So I wasn’t necessarily a fan of the band until I heard them live. … But I never figured I’d be working with them.”

99 Ranch’s seafood counter is enormous – and it needs to be: the store serves seafood eaters of many nationalities and income levels all over the Bay Area. The selection is huge: grouper from Peru, fish from Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India.

Carlos Montelibano heads the fish department at the 99 Ranch in Mountain View where the prices are low.

I’m sitting on a brown leather couch inside Studio A at Hyde Street Recording in the Upper Tenderloin. A white baby grand piano sits to my left and a faded blue rug with pink roses lies on the hardwood floor in front of me. If you close your eyes and listen hard enough, you may be able to hear the sounds of San Francisco in the 60s.

Fifty years ago, this building was called Wally Heider Recording. And this room was used by the likes of Crosby Stills Nash and Young, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Starship.

Close to 100,000 jobless Californians will lose as many as 20 weeks of federal unemployment insurance benefits by the end of May. Improvements in California’s economy and a drop in the unemployment rate will end an extension of federal benefits. At an Employment Development Department on Franklin and Turk, KALW’s Angela Johnston spoke to Little Vila, John Saunders, Maurice Gonzales and Yvette, who wouldn’t give her last name. Here are their thoughts on being unemployed in today’s economy: