Bob's Retail Enterprises LLC

The company

Bob's Retail Enterprises LLC is an Oregon limited liability company based in Salem and a subsidiary of D217 Development LLC. It was formed to acquire and operate the business now trading as Bob's Adult Bookstore, and took over operations on April 1, 2025, following the death of the previous owner.

We are deliberately small. Decisions are made by the owners, usually the same week they are raised. If you write to this company, an owner reads it.

The store we inherited

Bob's opened in Salem in 1975 and has operated continuously since, at three different Salem addresses over that half century. It has been gay-owned for all fifty of those years, through every change of hands. That is unusual, and it is not an accident: each owner sold to someone who understood what the place was for.

I never met Bob himself, but I have known every owner who came after him. When I took responsibility for this business my first goal was to get it out of the dark ages and get it legal. At the start we had no real idea what we were working with — it was bubblegum and shoestrings. Schuyler Emerick, Owner

How we operate

• Discretion is the product. In our category, a customer's privacy is not a courtesy, it is the reason they chose us. That principle shapes how we handle records, cameras, staffing and this website.
• Legal and documented, not approximately. Written policies, a real handbook, proper payroll and tax treatment, licensing kept current.
• Pay and treat people properly. Scheduled raises, premium pay on major holidays, and a staff who are told what the business is actually doing.
• Everyone is welcome, and that is load-bearing. A store like ours has always been a place where people who were not welcome elsewhere could be themselves. We intend to keep it that way.

Ownership

The company is owned by Schuyler Emerick and Albino Balestra, who are married and hold equal standing in the business. Day-to-day store management and operations are handled by a small salaried management team in Salem.

Where we are going

We built the company's systems — purchasing, payroll, reporting, compliance — to carry more than one store. If the right specialty retail business comes up in the Willamette Valley, we are in a position to operate it rather than merely own it.