Goodbyes

A couple of retail traditions in the corridor have announced that they're closing recently: Hall's Home Furniture in Cedar Rapids and Lorenz Boot Shop in Iowa City.

Both are owned by women who were interviewed in the local papers. I'm just guessing their tone and attitude from the printed word--and it sounds like they're a bit honked off. There were comments (very much paraphrased by me) to the effect of shoppers ignored them, so now they're going away. And if we want local businesses to remain open, we'd better pay attention to them. One sort of blamed the Internet; one sort of blamed the big chain stores.

I see two sides of this. First, we, the corridor shoppers, do need to pay attention to where we leave our dollars. It is not only rude to shop locally (for example, to make sure the boots fit), then buy (cheaper) on the Internet; but it's foolish. Every time we send our dollar out into the cyber-ether, it's gone. Just like shopping at some of the big chains. It's not circulating here, and odds are, it's not going to find its way back to your wallet. We need to pay attention to all of our purchases to protect our neighbors. We have Amana appliance, General Mills, Quaker and other plants here. We should do our best to buy from them.

Second, back to Hall's and Lorenz. We'll take part of the blame for your demise, but you better look in the mirror too. We're wearing shoes and sitting on sofas. Be sure you let us know why you're different, how you're serving us better and that you're keeping up with what we want. My recollection is that most of your advertising was sale-based. If you train us to wait for a sale, we will. If you jump into the price war with big chains or the Internet, you'll lose. We all need to innovate and keep moving forward with our business models, or we'll be toast too.

(Remember, I welcome your feedback. If you have a different opinion, start typing!)