By Mark Aldrich
Running parallel to my career as a writer and editor is my life spent in many different retail environments behind counter after counter. I have seen many if not all of the changes that the retail world has confronted in the last four decades. Ulster County continues to weather storms of economic uncertainty with its hallmark creativity, and it appears to us at Yokel to be in a renaissance, an exciting period of new, local, growth.
I’ve worked in a grocery store, several departments in a department store, a bookseller, an electronics store. In each one we started to feel the effect of malls, then big box retailers, then online stores, as they attracted customers away from us. The value of a locally owned store in a community appeared to be on the wane for the last two decades. * * * *
One day in the mid-90s, I visited a bookstore during my lunch hour. I often did so. This was a topic of comedy between that bookstore owner and I, as I worked at a different bookstore in the same town, across the street. At the time, New Paltz sustained three vastly different booksellers, one which featured new titles, one which sold used books, and another which was a niche-interest store. Thus, none of the three were rivals, per se. Often a customer would misremember at which store they’d placed a special order.
So one day I walked across the street to the not-rival bookseller and saw that there was no one inside, customer or employee. The door was open, so I assumed the person behind the counter had needed to get change for the cash register and would be right back. Perhaps the employee was over at the store I’d just left. I started to browse. The doorbell clanged and a customer came in, then I heard it again, and it was another customer.
This anecdote may be more about small-town life than about retail life. One of my fellow customers walked to the register, turned around, saw me, and said, “You work here, right? I always see you in the bookstore. I’m ready to check out.” It was as if there was a saying I had never heard, “When one has seen one clerk in a bookstore, one has seen them all,” or “All book sellers work in all booksellers.”
I stepped behind the counter of a store that did not employ me. The store used an old-fashioned cash register, something I had no experience with but could figure out, and a notebook in which to write the titles of books sold and the price charged. I could calculate the sales tax easily enough. Disaster did not follow. I rang the customer out, then the next one. At the end of my lunch hour, it was time to return to my real employer, so I wrote a note to whomever would return that some customers had purchased books and a fellow bookseller from across the street had helped out. The store owner and I laughed about it a few days later on a subsequent lunch hour visit. He gave me a book of my choosing as payment for my fifteen minutes of almost-employment.
It may be that this story could not be replicated today, since most stores use computers or tablets at the point-of-sale, and one would need to know the software the store uses and need to know (or guess) the log-in and password for that software. The store that actually employed me already had a system like that, so the mirror image of my anecdote could not have happened, even back then, with an employee from across the street suddenly employed for a few minutes in my store.
Through my college years, a few years earlier, I worked at a department store, Montgomery Ward, in my hometown. Department stores were the “big box” retailers of their era, but in fact the experience of a department store was more like a visit to a village square. Each department had its own staff and its own checkout counter. One could spend a day in one of these stores: on a Saturday morning, one could bring the car to the store’s automobile shop for a checkup or repairs, walk into the store and pick out a color for a household painting job and order a gallon to be mixed, stroll across the aisle to the store’s customer diner and eat breakfast, remember that you needed a new coffeemaker and walk over to housewares to take care of that. When the car repairs were done, they would make an announcement over the loudspeaker. Everyone, including the cook in the cafeteria, was an employee of the department store. The big box retailers provide many of these services, including fast food chain restaurants, but one might not see an employee until the person who checks receipts on the way out.
Even New Paltz had a small-chain department store, Ames, now defunct, outside the village.
When the big box retailers started to proliferate in the 90s, the department stores started to close, the single-purpose stores like booksellers and record shops started to close, and Main Streets across the country started to display more “For Sale” signs than hours of operation signs. In one Midwestern city that I lived in in the early 2000s, I watched as a very famous fast food chain restaurant that was located in that city’s downtown reduced its hours to weekday mornings only and then closed a few months later. It remains the only fast-food chain restaurant that I have seen go out of business. (The chain itself still thrives.) The city had several malls anchored by big box retailers, and they were always crowded with customers, unlike downtown.
Online retailers positioned themselves as the department stores of the current age about a decade ago, and now the malls have started to disappear.
Even with the convenience that the online retailers provide (albeit for a monthly fee), there is an experience that only Main Street retailers can provide: a conversation with a human being. Local knowledge. Connection. People want this again. On a recent Sunday, some out-of-town friends and I walked through New Paltz. The sidewalks were as crowded as I can remember them being, and most every storefront was open for business. Some of the stores have been open for months and some for decades, but they were all open.
The desire and need for a village square moved from the village square to the department stores to the malls and has now returned to the village squares. We at Yokel are happy to see and help the locally owned, mom-and-pop retailers in our beautiful communities thrive and grow in ways that can feel brand-new but really come down to a rediscovery of our need for local connection.
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Mark’s website: http://thegadabouttown.com/