There was a shop around the corner from my house which sold furniture and random household storage thingies. It was a longtime resident of Piedmont Avenue and I suppose it had a loyal following. I always enjoyed browsing, and I bought the odd thing over the year — most memorably, the bracelet-sized diamond "ring" and keychain squeezelights that were gifts at a bachelorette party that I organized for a friend. I didn't make larger purchases there, and I'm not really sure why. Some of the stuff didn't quite fit or suit my house — there was a hard-edged, sharp-cornered 80s look to much of their offerings.
More recently, though, they'd brought in some nice wooden furniture and those stylish metal racks you see in kitchens. I kept thinking, "I should buy those shelves!" But I didn't do it. My boyfriend moved in and brought his own furniture, and the challenge of merging our two overstuffed households was daunting enough.
The other day I walked by the store around the corner to find that its windows had been papered over and it appeared to have gone out of business. When I looked more closely, I realized that they had left a sort of "Dear John" letter as a farewell to the neighborhood that had been their home base for over two decades.
In front, there was a note about how they might be opening in a community that was "more business friendly and offered parking." Around the corner, it became ever more clear that the breakup was not a clean one. Flyers for TechLine desks were pasted up with bitter annotations about how you couldn't get this stuff anymore, the manufacturers had become tired of trying to compete with cheap imitations, and so were the shop owners. "7 of 7 of the staff had college degrees. 3 of 3 were college students. Try getting that kind of service at X Mart."
Ouch.
I'm always sad when a small business closes, and I was fond of this one, and always intended to shop there more. Perhaps the road to bankruptcy is paved with such good intentions.
But the author of those notes didn't take into consideration the ages, tastes, and budgets of the local customers. I never got a mailing from the store inviting me to drop by, much less offering me any kind of discount. When they were apparently losing business, they didn't change their stocks that much, at least not in a way that was apparent to passers-by like me. And when they finally could no longer keep going, they left a bitter farewell note, in effect, scolding people in the neighborhood for not supporting them.
Perhaps they expected that the reaction of people like me would be, "They all had college degrees? I had no idea! I should definitely have shopped there more often, had I known." Or "Even though I work at a nonprofit, I should have made a point of spending my limited dollars at their store, rather than going to those sales at Ikea and Design Within Reach." It's possible that some of my neighbors are now repenting their evil shopping ways as I type this, chastened by those sad little notes in the empty storefront. Maybe more of us will try to shop locally.
However, if the shop owners do make good on their promise to reopen in another location, I can't imagine that I'll spend much energy trying to track them down and spending any money there. I'm only human, and I don't much like being told off by humans or furniture shops. People are funny that way.
