Sharper Image Corp., which filed for bankruptcy protection last month, is seeking court permission to close 96 stores nationwide - including nine in Northern California - as part of its plan to reorganize and liquidate assets.

In documents filed this week, the San Francisco retailer known for its high-tech and high-end gadgetry wants to shutter stores in San Francisco’s Union Square, Burlingame, Milpitas, Los Gatos, Santa Rosa, Roseville (Placer County), Sacramento, Fresno and Carmel.

The 184-store chain, which filed Feb. 19 for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, must first obtain bids from liquidators and receive approval from the court before initiating the closures. The company filed the list of stores it wants to close on March 4.

Bay Area locations spared include Spear Street in San Francisco, San Mateo, Palo Alto, Corte Madera, Pleasanton and Santa Clara, according to stores listed on the company’s Web site.

In related news, Sharper Image said Friday it will honor the full value of its gift cards, but only if consumers buy items that cost twice the value of the certificates.

The announcement marks a change from the company’s earlier decision to stop accepting gift cards, at least temporarily, as is typical when a company files for bankruptcy reorganization under Chapter 11.

Under the plan, Sharper Image said it would immediately honor gift cards as long as they are redeemed in one purchase that costs double the value. For example, a $25 gift card will be redeemed in full as long as the customer purchases $50 in merchandise.

Customers who don’t like that policy are urged to hang on to their cards because the company promised it is working to be able to honor the cards’ full value.

“We have worked very hard to address the concerns of our customers and to dispel rumors in the media that our cards are worthless. That is simply not true,” Robert Conway, Sharper Image’s chief executive officer, said.

Conway said that while the new policy is “not a complete solution,” it does provide some satisfaction to customers.

By Friday afternoon, the new gift-card policy had not been updated on the company’s Web site, and some store employees had not yet been informed. A Sharper Image spokesman confirmed the policy had just been approved by the court and the company was in the process of updating its stores and its Web site.

In its heyday, Sharper Image became well known for its sales of high-end air purifiers. Negative reviews of the company’s Ionic Breeze air purifier, followed by a failed libel challenge, reportedly contributed to the company’s fall.

Sharper Image’s competitors are taking advantage of their rival’s misfortune.

PurePro LL, a direct competitor of the Ionic Breeze, will redeem Sharper Image gift cards of any denomination for $50 toward the purchase of the Los Angeles online retailer’s air purifier. One card will be honored per order.

“Even if you have a $25 gift card at Sharper Image, we’ll give you $50,” said PurePro spokesman Todd Geller, adding that the offer is set to expire March 31 but the company plans to extend it.

Brookstone Inc., a Sharper Image competitor, will offer Sharper Image gift-card holders 25 percent off any purchase, regardless of the card’s value.

Guy Amuial, a 31-year-old mortgage broker from Virginia Beach, Va., went to a Sharper Image store last Saturday and tried to use a $50 gift card from Christmas to buy a massage chair. After being told the store could not honor the card, he went to a nearby Brookstone store where he saw the 25 percent deal. The savings: nearly $2,000.

“Not only did a buy myself a chair, but I bought my brother one as well,” he said. “I turned $50 into two grand.”

What’s in store

– Sharper Image is seeking court permission to close 96 of its 1,884 stores, including those in San Francisco’s Union Square, Burlingame, Milpitas, Los Gatos, Santa Rosa, Roseville (Placer County), Sacramento, Fresno and Carmel.

– Sharper Image Inc. has resumed honoring gift cards.

– For more information, go to «www.sharperimage.com».

– Court documents pertaining to the company’s bankruptcy filings are available at links.sfgate.com/ZCRG.

Source: Sharper Image.

E-mail Victoria Colliver at vcolliver@sfchronicle.com.

Even billionaires get the blues

Feeling a little lighter in the pocket these days because of the slumping stock market? Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, feel your pain.

The two men have lost billions of dollars in the wake of their Mountain View Internet titan’s shares tumbling 42 percent from their all-time high in November to close Friday at $433.35.

The actual losses for Brin and Page are unknown. But you can get a pretty good idea based on their reported holdings in Google as of Dec. 31.

Brin’s 28.6 million shares are now worth $12.4 billion, down $8.8 billion from five months ago. Page’s 29.1 million shares are worth $12.6 billion, down $9 billion in the same period.

Granted, they’re both still billionaires and enjoy a lavish lifestyle. But you know, every penny counts, even for a couple of the world’s richest people.

The passports of two Britons alleged to have travelled to India to buy kidneys in an organ transplant racket have been confiscated by police in the Indian capital, investigators confirmed yesterday.

Police said “two British people have not been let out of the country” as part of their investigation. “We are holding their passports. They are helping with our investigation - [there] are allegations that they are part [of the buying ring]. We are cross-checking certain things. They have been apprehended but not yet charged,” said the deputy commissioner of Gurgaon police, Rakesh Arya. The police refused to divulge their names and the British High Commission said it had not been informed of the investigation.

After raiding a private hospital last week in Gurgaon, an upmarket suburb of Delhi, police found that poor labourers had had their kidneys removed, sometimes against their will, and sold to clients from around the world. Doctors charged 1.5m rupees (18,750) for a kidney transplant while the donor was paid just about 40,000 rupees (500).

The trade has shocked India, which banned the sale of kidneys for commercial gain in 1994 with jail terms of up to five years for those found guilty. However, the ring is believed to have seen more than 500 organs bought in the past nine years.

The police have seized computers and are decoding email accounts. Five labourers, three of whom had lost kidneys, were also rescued. A number of foreign nationals, who were caught waiting for transplants, have been questioned.

The masterminds behind the illegal trade, say officers, were two Indian brothers, neither of whom had any medical training but who apparently supervised the surgery. One of the brothers has been arrested in Mumbai but the kingpin, Amit Kumar, is believed to be on the run in Canada. Television channels reported that a nurse, a foreign national called Linda, has confessed to police about breaking the law.

The investigation has now spread to seven Indian states with doctors accused of operating across northern India.

India’s government has been spurred into action, with the country’s top investigating agency drafted in to lead the inquiry. The health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, said he would make the existing organ trade regulations “more stringent”. According to a government estimate, more than 100,000 kidney transplants are required in India every year, but only 5,000 are performed legally.

Experts say the black market for kidneys is booming for two reasons. One is that western patients can pay a poor person a year’s salary for an organ. The second is that there is no affordable public healthcare system in India - hospital facilities for the storing and transporting of organs remain inadequate.

“This problem comes from the economic disparity between the western hemisphere and the poor here. Western patients can simply buy organs and in this country we have no national health service. Only 20% in the country can access any kind of medical care. We need a much bigger deterrence in terms of jail sentences,” said Sandeep Guleria, professor of medicine at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences.