Gross receipts tax of 0.69% plus 1.5% payroll tax [1]. $20,000 trash cans [2] and arcane permitting processes for brick and mortar businesses. The city's leadership has their head so far up their ass about going after rich techies that they proposed a tax which was intended to target Amazon, but was so poorly written that they asked to retract it off the ballot because Amazon wasn't subject to the tax but small businesses were [3].
Not to mention allowing camping and undesirability, and property crime like smashed windows and stolen bikes, open air drug use, just to name a few. Source - lived in East Bay, worked in SF for almost a decade.
$20,000 for a pilot trash can is pretty ridiculous, however.
$20,000 was for a one off (well, each of the three custom designs cost about that much) garbage can. The off-the-shelf models cost between $600 and $2,800 and the city budgeted no more than $3,000 per can.
Not to press this point too hard, but "no more than $3,000 per can" is still ridiculous. They're $175 apiece here[1].
I can understand spending $20,000 (or even $60,000) on the pilot designs. But TFA makes it sound like the city was billed $20,000 just to fabricate it.