Had a bit of a shock yesterday on my daily walk downtown: 2 more long established businesses in the downtown have closed permanently. One was a massage therapy clinic and the other my favourite local ladies dress shop.
The owner of the dress shop was, for the last time, locking the door of her now empty retail space as I passed by so I asked her if she was changing locations or closing completely. She decided to give up her store after several decades of clothing retail work because she is older and wishes to retire. As seems to be the case here these days, no one in town wanted to step in and buy out her business to keep it running.
So with these new closures on top of the loss of the pizza parlor and antique shop, all in the same block, our downtown retail shopping has essentially shrunk from 3 blocks along Main Street to 2. So sad..... I also discovered that the only restaurant downtown has changed owners and o my, the food has been very poor of late. Scratch that possibility off my list of places to go for a lunch treat when my husband is out of town.
Personally I am very sad about the loss of the clothing store. The lady in charge always had an excellent selection in her small space and most reasonable prices. We still have 5 clothing retailers in town but only 3 that are not specifically casual wear or jeans and their prices are so out of line that I rarely shop at any of them. (Hint: Joseph Ribkoff is NOT a high fashion designer label and shouldn't be priced as such. Also, washable plastic jackets made in China are not worth paying the hefty over two hundred dollar price no matter how many silver painted zippers they carry on the front pockets!) They all carry more or less the same type of product anyway, tacky patterns and overly bright colours. As much as I want to shop locally, for decent clothing I will be forced to drive to a city now.
The other day a visiting friend mentioned that wow, our town here is certainly booming. He was basing his opinion on the number of new hotels being built along the highway and the number of transport trucks and semis stopped along the service road. We explained to him that the new hotels were being built to house temporary work crews for the railway, road maintance department and the oilfield. There are indeed a tremendous number of those employees coming in for stays of several weeks at a time, but they are not moving here with their families. Other than some restaurant meals and some gasoline they are not really contributing much to the local economy. They don't purchase much in the way of groceries or clothing here, they don't have children in school or wives seeking local employment.
No, our town is not really booming. Its core is dying out slowly but surely. Even the little mall out on the highway continues to suffer losses, with no significant rise in profit for the businesses that have been able to remain out there. Perhaps the closure of the downtown clothing store will boost the business of the mall stores, I don't know. The restaurant in the mall is losing money and the owners have been forced to close their small "drinks and snacks" booth in the middle of the mall. There are a few grubby tables, chairs and 2 seater couches sitting there but the kiosk is no longer open, just sitting there disintegrating, bits and pieces falling off it onto the floor as the days go by.
The local WalMart cannot seem to retain staff and its small offering of stock doesn't recommend it unless a person is fortunate enough to stumble on the item they need somewhere in the midst of aisles crammed with pallets of cardboard boxes. Some of the ladies wear cannot be accessed because of the pallets jammed against the clothing displays. Friends from Alberta who were just transferred into the area made their first foray into WalMart the other day and were so disgusted they will likely go 2 hours out of their way to a different town all together if they need anything specific to WalMart. Ours has so little and the staff is not what you would call helpful or friendly. Ours is following the pattern of the rest of the town businesses: slowly sliding into filthy disarray and the typical, "There, that's good enough." sort of attitude. Even a small strive toward excellence could help this place so much.
I don't know what it will take to revitalize this area, if it is even possible at this point on the slow slide downward. I believe in supporting local merchants but over the past 4 years too many of them have packed up and disappeared, or have had to cut back substantially on their stock, forcing me to go elsewhere and adding to the loss in my own community.
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