While I’ve been preoccupied with the off-blog obligations of teaching and grading, there’s been a mini-exodus of stores from downtown Keene, winter being the slow season for retail business.
Remember the boutique whose window I showed you smashed and then repaired? They’re now closed, having liquidated much of their inventory in order to move their brick-and-mortar business online, leaving an empty shell in the place of their once-colorful window display.
After some 40 years of business, Paulsen’s Bookland has similarly pulled up stakes, closing stores both here in Keene and in Concord, NH. It’s difficult to maintain a small, family-run bookstore with heavy competition from online and Big Box retailers; truth be told, I never bought anything at Bookland, disappointed that it stocked more magazines than books.
Although I as much as anyone agree with the downtown merchants’ slogan that “It’s Keene to Shop Locally,” I don’t buy many magazines, and I don’t frequent upscale boutiques: my business isn’t the kind either of these stores tried (unsuccessfully, apparently) to court. Still, the sight of empty shop windows is a sad one, something that makes me wish I were a more Conspicuous Consumer whose wallet could keep Ma and Pa in business. Instead, I tend toward frugality, tending to the off-blog obligations of teaching and grading, walking the dog, and taking pictures: activities that do little, unfortunately, to fuel the local economy.
Mar 1, 2007 at 1:07 pm
I think Keene needs more (or a proper) art gallery. Those spaces look like great spots. Do many of the cafes in town display work from local artists?
of course, I’m a man of whimsy not business practicality. Art before commerce I say!
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Mar 1, 2007 at 2:55 pm
Yeah. Tyrone, PA (population: 5,000) has a small art gallery. It shares a storefront with a janitorial supply company. Bet you won’t see *that* in your big, fancy cities!
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Mar 1, 2007 at 4:45 pm
It’s such a complicated thing – while I embrace the access provided by technology and on-line retailing, I also lament the loss of the comfort and feeling of actually going into a store to shop – it seems that we should be able to have and enjoy both, but the reality doesn’t support that hypothesis!
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Mar 1, 2007 at 8:09 pm
Oh, how sad. Is that Pink? Wasn’t the proprietor preggers – maybe she just preferred to be home? In which case it wouldn’t be quite so sad.
I like the art gallery/janitorial supply idea. In Mexico all the stores seemed to be whatever various family members happened to specialize in – we sell tamales and spare car parts, we have a hair salon and an internet cafe, we sell liquors and do accounting and occasionally we have extra eggs to sell.
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Mar 1, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Going, going, gone, I lament the closing of a fabric store very near to me and convenient. The new mall fabric store ‘mauled’ it away, I think.
Magazines! One I subscribe to (Smithsonian), and so am not dependent on buying it from the bookstore, and one I get at the bookstore, KMT, about Ancient Egypt.
Frugality! I could do more of that. It’s good for your OWN economy! But books are arriving, (and no, I did not get them from the local Hastings!) (They would have had to special order them, anyway.)
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