Lost, but hopefully not gone
January 7, 2010
As our consumer culture becomes more and more homogonized, it is downright heartbreaking to watch independent shops and important trades fall by the wayside. Completely abstaining from nonlocal buying isn’t always possible; for example, the city closest to me has zero independently-owned bookstores. The tiny town where we now love has one downtown, but it carries very few titles. So, Amazon and half.com still get plenty of my book business. A few more trades and shops I’ve watched disappear in the areas where I’ve lived…
*When I was a kid, we took our shoes to the cobbler for repair and new soles–now I can’t even find a cobbler in our town.
*I would like to get some cushions reupholstered for an old chair, yet I am unable to locate an upholstery shop in the area. The last one in our town closed down a few months ago.
*While there are still some great hardware stores where I grew up, the local ones here are tiny and don’t have everything you need for a big project. I had to go to Lowe’s for all our rewiring materials.
And what is still flourishing? Thankfully, there are still plenty of locally-owned restaurants, coffee shops, drugstores, and gift shops. And thrift stores, of course!
Is anything disappearing around you that you are sad to see fall away? Are there any trades or shops you need to use, but can’t find anymore?
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1.
Cate | January 7, 2010 at 4:00 pm
We’re lucky to live in Louisville, which has a campaign to “keep Louisville weird” with local businesses. Admittedly, I often take the easy way out and shop at national chains, but we do send a lot of business towards the local fair-trade (and nonprofit) home goods store, the local hardware store (though we haven’t had any big projects to shop for), the local coffeeshop, and restaurants. We should really be making a much bigger effort to shop local, however.
2.
thisthriftedlife | January 7, 2010 at 6:18 pm
Cate, that sounds like a fun campaign! Buying and eating locally is definitely a journey–food in the offseason (when markets are closed down) and things like cat litter from Target are two areas I still struggle with constantly.
3.
Cate | January 7, 2010 at 9:08 pm
I agree on the food count. Our farmer’s market is open year-round, but in the winter, there really isn’t much to be found beyond meat, eggs, honey, and (sometimes) root vegetables. We shop at a local health food store for some things, but their produce is often icky, so we still spend a lot of money at Kroger on basics (year-round) and produce (in the winter).
4.
Frugal Trenches | January 7, 2010 at 6:07 pm
It is sad really isn’t it? I try to shop local and small as much as possible. Have you read the book America Unchained?
5.
thisthriftedlife | January 7, 2010 at 6:19 pm
I haven’t–I’ll be checking it out though asap. Thanks for the rec!
6.
shoestringalley | January 7, 2010 at 6:19 pm
Dry Cleaners! There isn’t one in either the town I live or the town I work and my coat is sadly in need of attention…
7.
thisthriftedlife | January 7, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Shoestring, that really stinks. Though I don’t dry clean any clothes, we do have a great local cleaner’s here that a friend turned me on to–they are great at alterations and very reasonably priced.
8.
Ria | January 7, 2010 at 6:36 pm
I miss second-hand bookstores. About a decade ago, this city had about 7 of them just in the uptown area alone. Now we’re down to 2: one that sells more comics than books, and the other that mostly focuses on antiques and coins and sells books on the side. Some thrift stores sell cheap books, but it’s not the same as an entire store devoted to them.
It’s a shame, since in high school I gained a small library’s worth of novels from second-hand stores!
Of course, this is what I get for living in the city with the lowest literacy rate in the province.
9.
Kathyg | January 7, 2010 at 11:44 pm
I have not yet found anyone (in our area on the southern NJ shore) who will sharpen knives or scissors. Back in the day , when I was a kid, a gent used to drive up and down the blocks of our neighborhood in north Jersey, with a grinding wheel in the back of his old truck. He’d yell out “knives sharpened” and drive slowly until someone hailed him at the curb. Boy, I’m dating myself here: where have the sharpening guys disappeared to??
10.
ConsciouslyFrugal | January 8, 2010 at 9:29 pm
Since I live in Long Beach, just outside of the sprawl that is Los Angeles, I’m lucky to have lots and lots of local businesses. Sadly, I had to move out here because Wal-Mart and big ag killed most small towns around me in the Midwest (I spent most of my days in a college town that was pretty good about keeping local businesses thriving. They fought Barnes & Noble for years but eventually lost).
But here’s some b.s.–my neighborhood has been gentrified over the past 8 years or so and local businesses were forced under imminent domain laws into less appealing areas in favor of big box stores. Can you believe that? Over the long run, it’s more damaging to our city, because those dollars won’t be put back into the community. Freakin’ morons.
The saddest closing (chiming in with Ria here) was a huge used bookstore called Acres of Books. It was so large it was actually considered a tourist attraction. It was closed under imminent domain in favor of a parking lot. Unbelievable. All the more reason to support local businesses, start a local business and stay involved in local politics!
11.
Shopping Golightly | January 9, 2010 at 10:48 pm
We recently lost our neighborhood mom and pop hardware store. The staff was amazing and so familiar with the homes of our 130+ year old neighborhood. For example, when we remodeled our kitchen, we had to pull five layers of flooring. We were doing great until we hit the second to the last layer that had this black goop that was near impossible to pull. I took my story to the mom and pop hardware and they laughed and told us we’d hit the layer put down in the ’20s and the goop was roofing tar. Compare that wisdom to when I walked into the new chain replacement store and asked the teen cashier for jute. He looked at me like I’d just asked him to sell me some illicit drug.
A funny story about the old mom and pop. At three years of age my oldest daughter was trying to describe the taste of Brie cheese. She said it tastes like the floor of the hardware store. I thought her description quite poetic but didn’t want to know the origins. At that age, she also told me that a leather furniture store we were once walking through smelled, “like bottoms”. She was right.
12.
Grungequeen | January 14, 2010 at 1:28 am
I live in Toronto, Ontario and write regularly about independently-owned stores (and natch, I support them by shopping in them!). I’ve seen many a locally-owned shop close, but just as many open to fill their places. I admire the sheer guts of these people as they have to be it all: shopkeeper and salesperson, buyer, marketer, etc. I’m not so sure if there’s any one particular type of store that’s closing here, but one trend could be the independently-owned bookstore or music store – there are some indie ones around but online/electronic downloads seems to be slowly killing these kinds of businesses. So sad: I love small book shops that aren’t all corporate-ized.