Photo: Small Business Saturday/American Express
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of a current article from the Retail Doctor’s blog.
In New York City, a series of recent studies found a 27 percent retailer vacancy rate in the tony Upper West Side of Manhattan and a 20 percent vacancy rate in fashionable SoHo.
It seems even NYC has the same problem that bedevils many downtown shopping areas around the country. Shoppers and merchants want to know — what’s going on?
Are landlords at fault because quality merchants don’t want to open downtown?
Let’s face it — it's easy to complain about city councils who don’t do anything about parking, infrastructure or a million other things. But why do merchants think politicians should act before they themselves do?
Beyond making sure your own store isn’t among the reasons shoppers no longer head downtown, local merchants should band together.
Have a meeting and brainstorm why shoppers aren’t shopping downtown. Are stores closing at 5 p.m.? Are they closed Sundays? Is there no convenient parking? Is it hard to find sales help? Is the street filled with dingy windows? Get those with outdated stores to commit to cleaning up.
Encourage those who want to change to buy a half whisky barrel, fill it full of planting mix and colorful annuals like petunias, put it in front of their store, and take care of that one planter. That colorful planter becomes a visible signal to the rest of the merchants that they take their business and merchant community seriously.
If you offer some type of a once-a-month stroll-and-savor event to get people to discover downtown, make sure you place a heavy focus on local establishments to get customers to return on other days.
When enough retailers have fixed up their businesses and banded together, your local city officials will see something is happening and they’ll want to support you, a much better alternative to being told they have to support you.
Then tell your officials what you want: a renewed focus on the city center, new parking, more restaurants, a tax on landlords who are sabotaging your efforts to make downtown a vital retail shopping district, a façade improvement program, a branded entertainment district, or even retail sales training for all the merchants.
Stretched to the max with declining revenues and growing infrastructure and pension obligations, cities and counties aren’t looking for ways to spend, but to save. But when officials see your businesses are looking for a hand, after doing the hard work on your own stores and building a coalition with other stores, they’ll know you aren’t just coming to them with problems and looking for a handout.