131–140 of 256 posts
Terra Toys is 50 years old, its space shows it. Hand-written recommendations and prices. The employees demonstrate and play with the toys, welcome you genuinely as you enter. The toys seem curated for actual fun not schtick. I went in last week and it was popping. It’s an experience.
Does Main Street need to focus on experience to survive? If so, how does it monetize experience if selling items isn’t the first focus now?
Just last week, I was with one of my kids trying to kill some time before an appointment. I noticed a toy store in a strip mall, and I asked him if he wanted to check it out. His response was, "What's a toy store?" We did check it out, and he was pretty disappointed. Even though it was advertised as a STEM-oriented store, half of it was stress balls and jigsaw puzzles.
I own a reasonably well performing indie bookstore. I've noticed for the model to work you need a critical mass of other local shops clustered to make the trip an experience for families and diverse tastes. My working theory is that three of such small businesses are sufficient and could operate well with a common inventory strategy and manager (e.g. a bookstore, a toy store, and a tea or candy shop...nothing that sp…
Your comment makes me think of this recent post, https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-basket-and-the-booza , from an always wonderful blog which looks at why Australia has far more independent stores left compared to English cities and comes to a surprising conclusion: "The unifying claim is this: chains follow legibility. A city becomes legible to a site-selection algorithm when it has been organised into walkable,…
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Commercial real estate lending typically has a clause that allows pausing of payments during a vacancy and letting the interest accrue into the balance of the loan - effectively, the banks are giving the property owners a free option to try and get the vacancy cleared without affecting long-term incomes and asset prices.
That still sounds like a scam.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Commercial real estate lending typically has a clause that allows pausing of payments during a vacancy and letting the interest accrue into the balance of the loan - effectively, the banks are giving the property owners a free option to try and get the vacancy cleared without affecting long-term incomes and asset prices.
That still sounds like a scam.
Seems there's ALWAYS some from each column...
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It's Warhammer 40k. But beware, this game is designed to suck your wallet dry! ;)
"Get your kids addicted to M:TG so they'll never have enough money for drugs" - good advice from a coworker of mine
The Barnes and Noble bookstore I occasionally shop at has a second floor that is about half full of nothing but games, legos, puzzles. I honestly think they sell more of that than books these days.
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I see this also, but I don’t get it. An empty building still costs a bunch of taxes and upkeep and still rapidly deteriorates without tenants looking after it. Aren’t these people hemorrhaging money? What do they have to show for it? My city actually handled a majority of the rent so a business could revitalize a large-ish property that had been empty for years. Of course it failed as soon as that deal ran out.
As I've said elsewhere, when the economy improves it will be rented again.
And for how much?
The system is a formalised version of "Don't tell the Tsar bad news."
Everyone has to pretend Better Days Will Come™ while the economy saws through the branch it's sitting on.
It works until suddenly it doesn't, and the banks demand a bailout.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment makes me think of this recent post, https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-basket-and-the-booza , from an always wonderful blog which looks at why Australia has far more independent stores left compared to English cities and comes to a surprising conclusion: "The unifying claim is this: chains follow legibility. A city becomes legible to a site-selection algorithm when it has been organised into walkable,…
Not sure if this is an issue of Australian English vs American English but this is way too jargon-laden to mean anything at all to me.
I own a reasonably well performing indie bookstore. I've noticed for the model to work you need a critical mass of other local shops clustered to make the trip an experience for families and diverse tastes. My working theory is that three of such small businesses are sufficient and could operate well with a common inventory strategy and manager (e.g. a bookstore, a toy store, and a tea or candy shop...nothing that sp…
I have seen bookstore (second-handed books) thriving near universities. Your idea is actually very interesting and remind me of the mall model -- the mall model worked because everyone in the family gets his/her own share of pleasure. Of course the traffic matters a lot, too. Hope you start that experiment soon and succeed!
And then you have the academics. Tenured profs are relatively well paid. Adjuncts/assistants not so much, but they still like nice things.
The UK's public school towns (Marlborough, Harrow, Winchester...) often have a prosperous independent store economy on a smaller scale, for the same reasons.
Clusters work well in these towns.
If you try them elsewhere, like one of the UK's many run-down towns, they're more likely to fail because the prosperity just isn't there.