People would rather shop there than go online. Why? Because they are a part of the community.
At every farmer’s market or community event they have a booth giving out free glitter tattoos to children, and they employ several teenagers part time to wrap gifts (of course this is free too), apply tattoos, and help out in the store.
This isn’t a unique concept. Going the extra mile and doing seemingly unreasonably nice things wins you customers and loyalty.
I assumed many or most were gone because of Amazon. But after having kids and getting gifts for birthday parties, I've learned there are a lot of them and they are doing healthy business. Almost always a line on weekends.
Many or most in line take advantage of free gift wrap because they're on their way to a party.
In many ways it is more convenient than Amazon because you're going out anyway, why not get it at the last second with careful gift wrapping.
But even a recent trip to the suburbs surprised me. The Lego store in the mall had a velvet rope and long line of kids waiting to get in. I had never seen anything like this and apparently it is usually this busy.
We did check it out, and he was pretty disappointed. Even though it was advertised as a STEM-oriented store, half of it was stress balls and jigsaw puzzles.
Somehow giving $200 of Amazon credit doesn't feel the same :(
High rents for "prime" locations that, given the trend over the last 25 years, are no longer very prime, coupled with high business rates set by central government make it incredibly hard to make any money. And that's even before thinking about staff, where cover is no doubt needed at a higher concentration per square foot than warehouse based businesses.
Couple that with increases in minimum wage[0] and employer NI, and taking into account inflation and cost of living in recent years, and a lot of formerly workable retail businesses have simply been rendered non-viable.
[0] Which, by the way, I have no quarrel with.
On my first day, the very first thing I noticed was how a select few companies / online stores accounted for something like 80% of ALL the shipment that came through the facility: Clothes (with Zalando probably making up half of the shipments, just an endless stream of Zalando shipments...), make-up, and baby / kids toy stores. The last one kind of took me off guard, but then again, local toy stores have been dying for years.
Now all are gone, and I do wonder how kids of today will be able (for e.g.) to experience building a glider (balsa, cutting out with a razor, tissue covering with paste) and launching the final product into the sky. We have lost something.
BTW, if any of you or your children want to get into things aeronautical I can strongly recommend https://www.amazon.co.uk/Penguin-Book-Kites-. Some string, a little bamboo or dowel, and a binbag and you are ready to go.
https://www.playtoysandbooks.com
I live in the Andersonville neighborhood in Chicago, and it’s a small bit of joy to have a thriving boutique toy store to walk by as I go to the gym.
If you want to open a store you wait for a vacancy and apply. Citizens may vote for the applicants, the closer you live the more weight the vote has.
Count the store visitors and set some reasonable minimum. They don't have to buy anything. To much traffic would give priority for a larger building.
The first n square meters is free (smallest building). Low rent for anything above.
People want a tea room but you can't survive doing that unless you price the hot water absurdity. You can have lots of small shops selling eye candy. They don't have to sell a lot of wooden dragons, as long as it attracts visitors it's good to have.
It will be a town or city in the least boring percentage.
They are wonderful and a perfect example of a local toy store - a wide variety, personal service and free gift wrapping on all purchases (a life saver for anyone with kids and a birthday party to go to seemingly every other weekend).
A map of the network is here.
I asked her if she wanted the big or small version, she liked the small. Showing kids toys on a tablet is never going to replace the experience.
> DreamLand: another toy store chain with venerable Belgian roots owned by Colruyt group that briefly had a fancy underground store near a new parking lot not even five years ago. Of course it had to go. […] The bigger store about 30 km away from us recently also closed down. The store chain is still alive as is their webshop, but for how long… There’s still a DreamLand nearby but no longer in the centre.
DreamLand actually grew significantly in terms of physical stores due to their merger with ToyChamp, and is present in both the Netherlands and Belgium now. Of course, these huge (for European standards) stores tend to be located in malls and such; not in the historic city centres where toy stores used to be.
The local cash and carry also used to have a toy section - it was great because they had a deli where they also made coffee, a grocery section, bulk food section, and warehouse section that included toys. So we'd send the kids to the toy section, get a coffee, grocery shop. The building was a bit rundown, but that was part of the charm too. They upgraded it, it looks fancier but the toys are gone, the deli is gone, we only go for things like bulk flour now. I wonder if businesses like that have real trouble understanding loss leading sections like that.
Its just a matter of time before other stores follow, except for the Lego flagship stores , or the ocassional anime store in a bigger city.
Its sad.
Terra Toys is 50 years old, its space shows it. Hand-written recommendations and prices. The employees demonstrate and play with the toys, welcome you genuinely as you enter. The toys seem curated for actual fun not schtick. I went in last week and it was popping. It’s an experience.
Does Main Street need to focus on experience to survive? If so, how does it monetize experience if selling items isn’t the first focus now?
It is too bad, they were real good and carried items that could not be found elsewhere. Now seems all stores are the same.
Edit: Looked it up, the store stopped selling toys all together last year. But they are still in business selling other items that were in a different part of the store.
My stepfather was a salesman/distributor, selling the most diverse things (mostly electronics and mobile-related, but not only) to shops in the entire Lazio region in Italy.
95% of the shops closed, even among those that didn't he often wonders why they keep buying from him rather than on Alibaba or Amazon where he often cannot compete on price. And same for those client's customers.
It's hard to beat the convenience of online ordering for them, let alone the pricing.
But this has major implications for the local economies, especially of smaller places. As shops start to disappear so do the services or restaurants/bars connected to them.
Capitalism is brutal in its efficiency and there isn't much if anything that can be done to stop it, if people can get the same products at lower prices, they will.
I never really liked those small shops. Open Monday-Friday from 9 to 17 so a working person cannot really buy anything there. Prices usually 20% higher than online, minimal choice. It's not like they were selling something unique, they'd sell exactly same shit you'd see online, but at higher prices. The concept of "small shop being a part of the community" is completely foreign to me because what else you'd be doing in a shop other than walk in, buy, get out.
Supermarkets on the other hand, that's a different story. I live in the Netherlands and here we have strict laws pretty much about anything, including supermarkets. The goal is to prevent megastores from coming to existence which usually suck up all economic activity from the area. I have to say that the model is relatively successful - there are lots of mid-size supermarkets, so wherever you live, you're likely close to one.
But I have to say that it's another thing I miss from Poland. I fucking LOVED megastores. I could easily spend an hour walking through the cheese aisle and looking at all the products. For some inexplicable reason, despite the existence of megastores, the chain of small convenience stores Żabka is going through a renaissance - they're almost at every corner which means that if you're walking down the street and you're suddenly thirsty you're almost for sure close to Żabka. Another reason to go there is that they often offer products unavailable elsewhere - once I found sugar-free orange-vanillia coca-cola. I knew that god smiled to me that day. Oh, and typically they're open until 23:00.
Last time we went there, owners assaulted my child and knocked it onto the floor!