Tube City Almanac

November 13, 2007

Minding The Store

Category: Mon Valley Miscellany || By

I've never run my own business, so if it's fatuous of me to hand out business advice, I apologize in advance.

I like small, locally run businesses. Small businesses are run by your friends and neighbors. They return money to the community instead of sending it off to Wall Street.

I always remember what Garrison Keillor said in Lake Wobegon Days: "You should think twice before you get the Calvin Klein glasses from Vanity Vision in the St. Cloud Mall. Calvin Klein isn't going to come with the Rescue Squad and he isn't going to teach your children about redemption by grace. You couldn't find Calvin Klein to save your life.''

Often you get better service at small mom-and-pop businesses, but alas, not always. Some of them dare customers to shop there.

I have known a lot of people who started their own businesses, from gas stations to professional offices, and they all say it's hard work. When the weekend guy gets sick, or the burglar alarm goes off in the middle of the night, or a customer has a complaint, the owner gets the call. Most small business owners combine the duties of chief operating officer, secretary, treasurer, comptroller, sales clerk and janitor.

But all successful businesses share something in common: They're actually open.

You can't be in business if you're closed. And that's not double talk.

. . .

'C' is Not For Cookie: Let me illustrate: There's a little store near my house that's been a number of things over the years, mostly unsuccessful. Two years ago it was turned into a coffee shop and bakery.

One Saturday morning, after it had been open for a week or two, I decided to stop in and get breakfast and some cookies or doughnuts to take with me.

Though the hours on the door said something like "7 a.m. to 7 p.m.," it was closed. I stopped again the next Saturday, and it was closed again.

I finally found it open one Saturday and thought: Great, I'll get breakfast. "Oh, we stop serving breakfast at 11 on Saturday," the guy told me.

Fine, I said, I'll have lunch. "No, we only serve lunch during the week."

It wasn't a big surprise to see the place for sale a month ago.

Or take the drugstore I've been using for about three years. It's an independent, family-owned shop. The advertised hours are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Saturday, and 12 to 5 p.m. Sunday.

Imagine my surprise a few months ago when I stopped after work at 6 p.m. and found the lights out and the store closed. Well, people can get sick or have some emergency. I stopped the following night: Closed again.

The third day I called ahead of time: "How late are you open today?" 8 o'clock. I arrived at 6:35 p.m. Closed.

It happened again the other night. I stopped at 6 o'clock, and the place had closed early.

I'm going to try and talk to the owner and find out what the problem is. But if I don't get a satisfactory answer, I'm going someplace else.

. . .

Still on 'Bankers' Hours': A lot of the businesses that used to line Fifth Avenue Downtown, or Eighth Avenue in Homestead, were open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. A few were open a half-day on Saturday, or late on Thursday nights, but that was it.

That might have made sense in the 1950s or '60s, when men worked shifts at the mill and many women stayed home during the day. By the 1980s, most of their potential customers were at work or school from 9 to 5. Yet their hours didn't change.

I can understand wanting to work an eight-hour day, but why wouldn't they open daily from 12 to 8 p.m., instead of working "bankers' hours"?

When I asked a few business owners, the excuse I heard was that "there's no traffic Downtown at night." Well, if everyone is closed, of course there's no traffic.

It's a moot point now. There are few businesses left of any kind on Fifth Avenue, and Eighth Avenue in Homestead is a dreary row of thrift shops and empty windows, too.

If you've got a small retail or service business, it's almost impossible to compete with Wal-Mart, Target, CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreen's, etc. on price and selection.

I don't understand why so many small business owners handicap themselves further by making it so hard to give them money.






Your Comments are Welcome!

Jason,

Good ideas. I also never understood why salemen sat in car dealerships all day playing cards and shuffling papers either.

Hey, I think I know the little bakery/coffee shop you are speaking of that closed a little while back. It is open now, I believe under the management of a different family member. Give ‘em another shot. They are good folks.

-Paul
Paul Shelly (URL) - November 13, 2007



I have wondered how everyone is supposed to patronize businesses that are only open during the day when they’re all working themselves. There’s only so much you can do (and so far you can travel) during a lunch hour…
Karen (URL) - November 13, 2007



There’s a bakery in Brookline that is open until 8, and I believe its competitor (yes, we have two mom-and-pop bakeries) is open until 6, I think, but I recall walking in once after closing, apologetic, and being treated very well. It is closed Monday, but both bakeries have Sunday hours. (With so many churches in the neighborhood, they’d be crazy not to be.)

There was a coffee shop that opened some time ago and closed at 5 p.m. Unbelievable. It did not stay open long.
Jonathan Potts (URL) - November 14, 2007



Not only can’t I agree with you enough about this subject, but I’ve seen plenty of similar examples. It’s not just hours: my personal favorite was the alternative clothing store (long, long before Hot Topic) here in Dallas that carried one pair of every boot he had for sale…and that’s it. If you liked the boot he had on the shelf but you wore a Size 11 instead of a Size 7, not only you were told you were out of luck, but then you were berated for not buying the Size 7. Naturally, when he had no choice but to shut down (his trust fund was paying the initial amount on the proviso that it had to make a profit within two years), he whined and cried about how Dallas just can’t buy from an independent.

I particularly see this with independent bookstores, all over the country. I’m no fan of Borders or Barnes & Noble, but let’s take a look at the indie bookstore experience these days. If the place is open when you get out there, you’d best not hope that it’s next to a trendy area of town, because the valets will take all of the parking and the bookstore owner would rather whine about it than tell the valets to park elsewhere. The employees are usually too busy playing with the shop cat or Websurfing Harry Potter slashfic to ask if you need anything, and they go out of their way to ignore customers when customers obviously have a question to ask. If you don’t physically tackle a store employee in order to check out because s/he doesn’t make the connection between “customer at front with pile of books and huge wad of dollar bills” and “customer would like to purchase items and leave”, then you get either snide comments of “And why are you reading this?” or frantic jabberings from a fan who’s named her eighteen cats after characters in the author’s other novels. Oh, and what’s in the front window after you leave in disgust at a lousy selection and surly assistance? A big dot-matrix printed banner reading “Buy Local!”
Paul Riddell (URL) - November 16, 2007



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