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mallorys_cameraI had insomnia bad last night and ended up watching something called The Rachel Zoe Project on Bravo. Rachel Zoe evidently is the stylist who invented Nicole Richie, the first celebutante – famous only for being famous, a tautology that's come to define more and more of modern day culture. I see an unbroken line between Nicole Richie and Sarah Palin, but maybe that's just me.
Shallow people, shallow lives. I was utterly fascinated. There is a peculiar kind of Dance of the Red Masque vibe to watching shows like while financial markets across the world were unraveling.
Duke and Rosie’s closed. It was one of the greatest clothing stores in these parts. It sold Western wear: jodhpurs and cowboy hats and ostrich skin boots, those gossamer beaded ballerina tops, form-fitting jeans with studs and belts with rhinestone buckles that spell out Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues.
I used to go there sometimes when I was depressed. Admire my ass in those jeans in the dressing room mirror. Fantasize about what it would take before I dared to wear one of those ballerina tops. A month with a set of 10lb weights and I could be a cowgirl again!
Well… Maybe a cow dowager.
Duke and Rosie’s was one of the stores Bill Grimm seduced me with when I was first thinking about signing a lease.
“They make $500,000 a year!” he told me. Half a million dollars!”
If Duke and Rosie’s makes five hundred thousand dollars a year, then certainly I can make two, I thought.
That clank you hear is the steel trap slamming shut.
So around sunset yesterday this guy calls the store. He asks for me by name. Then he stammers for ninety seconds. I’m thinking, I can’t owe him money or he’d be more belligerent – but why the hell else would anybody call me? Finally he says plaintively, “I’m thinking of buying the Del Sol store next to you and I wanted to talk to some business owners on Cannery Row except nobody will talk to me –“
That’s because we don’t want to upset our landlords, Burt and Ted, the owners of the Cannery Row Company. We serve at their pleasure. We’re all behind on our rent.
Which should tell you everything you need to know about buying a business here.
Del Sol is a franchise that sells stuff soaked in a proprietary photochemical. The chemical changes color in the sun. The actual name of the chemical doesn’t appear anywhere on the website so I can’t do the Google due diligence that would allow me to link Del Sol to rising ovarian and prostate cancer rates. No, the worst thing I can say about them is that their designs are ugly and the photochemical washes out right around a garment’s third trip to the washing machine.
I don’t say this to the guy on the phone however.
“I’m happy to talk to you,” I say. “But isn’t the Cannery Row Company giving you the information you need?”
“Well, they are and they’re telling me that things are great and Cannery Row is world famous. But when I look around, I see a lot of empty store fronts.”
Connect your own dots.
“So… how’s business?”
“These are tough times for retail,” I say in a pleasant neutral voice.
And he begins to tell me about himself. He lives in Sacramento. Does IT for the state government. Married with children. Nice little house near William Land park. Makes little self-deprecating jokes as he talks to me, seems like a genuinely nice guy.
“We were in your store over Labor Day,” he said. “Great little store! Great concept. And you were doing great business!”
So we were over Labor Day. And that’s what I keep coming back to as proof of the business model. When people are around the Little Store does very, very well.
But most of the time there aren’t people around because Monterey is just not that compelling a destination.
“Kinda hard to run a business in Monterey from Sacramento,” I observe. “If you must start a retail business – and honestly I don’t quite understand why you would want to, particularly now – why don’t you start one in Old Town?”
“We thought of that,” says the guy. “See my wife fell in love with Del Sol when we went on a cruise three years ago. Things that change color in the sun! It’s kinda like solar power, right? It’s green!”
If you say so.
“But the Del Sol corporation wouldn’t go for Old Town. They only open stores in cruise ports. But they told us there was a shop for sale in Monterey –”
Monterey gets maybe half a dozen cruise ships per year. I guess that makes it a cruise port.
“Do you know why it’s for sale?” I ask.
“Not really –“
“Well, the people who first opened it were a retired couple from Las Vegas. The store actually did very well that first year except the owners did that thing you don’t do with a brand new business – they took money out of it.
“Siphoned money out of it actually. See they’d sunk their IRA and their entire life savings into it and miscalculated the shop’s operational costs. So they had nothing to live on. And a Las Vegas lifestyle to support –
“Eventually the store ran out of inventory and of course the owners didn’t have any money to restock. Some days we would actually do better than they did.
“The Del Sol corporation takes it very personally when one of its stores doesn’t make money. They figure the culprit is always bad management. So they wrested control back of the store and have been running it ever since. A franchise store without a franchisee. They’ve been trying to find a franchisee for three years.
“Some days we still make more money than they do. And except over Labor Day, we don’t make much money.”
“Wow,” the guy said. “I didn’t know that.”
“And now you do. How much rent is the Cannery Row Company asking for that location?”
“Seven thousand dollars a month –“
“Wow. And then there’s the cost of goods, and the actual franchise fee. I bet you’d have to clear fifteen thousand a month before you saw a cent –“
“My wife hates her job,” the guy said. “I mean really hates her job. So we thought maybe this –“
“It’s a long commute. Listen, I’m not telling you not to do it. But do the due diligence. Come down and stake out the store for a few days. Watch every single person who goes into the store, see what they do, figure out the browse-to-buy ratio. Maybe you clear a lot more than fifteen thousand dollars a month. I don’t know. But don’t let buying a business be an emotional decision.”
“You sound like you really know what you’re doing!” the guy said admiringly.
And I thought if only…
The organic bakery underneath Mystery Shopping Central disappeared one night. Ditto the Philly steak joint above Starbuck’s whose name I could never remember. The stained glass store on Foam Street is festooned with Everything Must Go banners. The cigar store, the pet boutique –
The place that used to be my favorite restaurant in Monterey – the Lighthouse Bistro – is now on its third makeover. I don’t know why they think a Texas-style BBQ joint will succeed where an Irish bar didn't. We're far away from Dublin. We’re far away from San Antonio.
One good thing happened anyway. The Little Store has a sometimes monopoly on the Best Damn BBQ Sauce in the entire world. It’s called Bad Daddy’s, a guy named Gerry makes it.
Gerry first walked into the store on a cold October night in 2004. He was tall, built like a bull and shaved his head. He stopped by the barbecue sauce shelves. “How do you find all these sauces anyway?”
I shrugged. “Oh, the usual ways. Catalogues, internet searches, trade shows, word of mouth. People send us things.”
“I make a barbecue sauce,” he said.
Lots of people make barbecue sauce. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s nothing special.
“I make the Best Damn BBQ Sauce in the world,” he said.
I’d heard that before.
The next night he showed up at the store again with a couple of Mason jars.
“Good label, huh?”
“That’s you,” I said, peering at it.
“The original Bad Daddy!” he cackled. “I’m moving right now so I’m not around much. But I’ll check back with you in a couple of weeks, see how you like it.”
I liked it very much. In fact, it was best sweet, spicy Kentucky/Tennessee-style sauce I'd ever used. Simply fantastic. When he got back to me, I was going to buy a couple of cases.
Except he didn’t get back to me. Not for months and months.
I finally had to blog about him to get him to get back to me. Like most narcissists, I figured he Googled himself by every nickname at least once a week.
So began a rather frustrating business relationship. Bad Daddy’s sold extremely well for us and sometimes Gerry would be around to make us more and sometimes he would be off having a life crisis – a life crisis that generally involved him losing his job, getting drunk and waking up in a ditch, a life crisis that prevented him from cooking up Bad Daddy’s for an indefinite period of time.
This June he lost another job. Simultaneously his long-suffering girlfriend finally had enough and dumped him. Gerry stopped answering his phone and email, and try as I might, I couldn’t reorder. June is not a good time to run out of a popular barbecue sauce. The hoards of people who came to the store for Bad Daddy’s got miffed when they couldn’t buy it.
“Maybe we’ll carry it again and maybe we won’t,” I would tell them truthfully when they asked.
This is not an answer that potential customers can relate to. Most stalked out in a rage without buying anything.
But there was his one couple who kept coming back. And who showed up yesterday for the fourteenth time.
“So. Has Bad Daddy recovered from his most recent crisis?” the man asked hopefully.
“I’ve given up on calling him," I sighed. "I guess I'll have to take it off the website. But wait – I have an idea. Let's call him together. You game?"
They were.
So we all got on the speakerphone and I dialed Gerry's number. "Gerry, I want Bad Daddy! Gerry, I need Bad Daddy! But don't take my word for it. Listen up!"
"Dude," said the man who'd come into the store, "you make the Best Damn BBQ Sauce in the world and it would be a real shame if you stopped making it. That sauce is your contract with God, man. Kobe Bryant plays basketball, Tom Waits sings and you make barbecue sauce. Do whatever you gotta do, but make some more."
Ten minutes after the couple left the store the phone rang and it was Gerry.
"Guess I'm back in the sauce business again," he said. "How many cases you want?"
Shallow people, shallow lives. I was utterly fascinated. There is a peculiar kind of Dance of the Red Masque vibe to watching shows like while financial markets across the world were unraveling.
Duke and Rosie’s closed. It was one of the greatest clothing stores in these parts. It sold Western wear: jodhpurs and cowboy hats and ostrich skin boots, those gossamer beaded ballerina tops, form-fitting jeans with studs and belts with rhinestone buckles that spell out Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues.
I used to go there sometimes when I was depressed. Admire my ass in those jeans in the dressing room mirror. Fantasize about what it would take before I dared to wear one of those ballerina tops. A month with a set of 10lb weights and I could be a cowgirl again!
Well… Maybe a cow dowager.
Duke and Rosie’s was one of the stores Bill Grimm seduced me with when I was first thinking about signing a lease.
“They make $500,000 a year!” he told me. Half a million dollars!”
If Duke and Rosie’s makes five hundred thousand dollars a year, then certainly I can make two, I thought.
That clank you hear is the steel trap slamming shut.
So around sunset yesterday this guy calls the store. He asks for me by name. Then he stammers for ninety seconds. I’m thinking, I can’t owe him money or he’d be more belligerent – but why the hell else would anybody call me? Finally he says plaintively, “I’m thinking of buying the Del Sol store next to you and I wanted to talk to some business owners on Cannery Row except nobody will talk to me –“
That’s because we don’t want to upset our landlords, Burt and Ted, the owners of the Cannery Row Company. We serve at their pleasure. We’re all behind on our rent.
Which should tell you everything you need to know about buying a business here.
Del Sol is a franchise that sells stuff soaked in a proprietary photochemical. The chemical changes color in the sun. The actual name of the chemical doesn’t appear anywhere on the website so I can’t do the Google due diligence that would allow me to link Del Sol to rising ovarian and prostate cancer rates. No, the worst thing I can say about them is that their designs are ugly and the photochemical washes out right around a garment’s third trip to the washing machine.
I don’t say this to the guy on the phone however.
“I’m happy to talk to you,” I say. “But isn’t the Cannery Row Company giving you the information you need?”
“Well, they are and they’re telling me that things are great and Cannery Row is world famous. But when I look around, I see a lot of empty store fronts.”
Connect your own dots.
“So… how’s business?”
“These are tough times for retail,” I say in a pleasant neutral voice.
And he begins to tell me about himself. He lives in Sacramento. Does IT for the state government. Married with children. Nice little house near William Land park. Makes little self-deprecating jokes as he talks to me, seems like a genuinely nice guy.
“We were in your store over Labor Day,” he said. “Great little store! Great concept. And you were doing great business!”
So we were over Labor Day. And that’s what I keep coming back to as proof of the business model. When people are around the Little Store does very, very well.
But most of the time there aren’t people around because Monterey is just not that compelling a destination.
“Kinda hard to run a business in Monterey from Sacramento,” I observe. “If you must start a retail business – and honestly I don’t quite understand why you would want to, particularly now – why don’t you start one in Old Town?”
“We thought of that,” says the guy. “See my wife fell in love with Del Sol when we went on a cruise three years ago. Things that change color in the sun! It’s kinda like solar power, right? It’s green!”
If you say so.
“But the Del Sol corporation wouldn’t go for Old Town. They only open stores in cruise ports. But they told us there was a shop for sale in Monterey –”
Monterey gets maybe half a dozen cruise ships per year. I guess that makes it a cruise port.
“Do you know why it’s for sale?” I ask.
“Not really –“
“Well, the people who first opened it were a retired couple from Las Vegas. The store actually did very well that first year except the owners did that thing you don’t do with a brand new business – they took money out of it.
“Siphoned money out of it actually. See they’d sunk their IRA and their entire life savings into it and miscalculated the shop’s operational costs. So they had nothing to live on. And a Las Vegas lifestyle to support –
“Eventually the store ran out of inventory and of course the owners didn’t have any money to restock. Some days we would actually do better than they did.
“The Del Sol corporation takes it very personally when one of its stores doesn’t make money. They figure the culprit is always bad management. So they wrested control back of the store and have been running it ever since. A franchise store without a franchisee. They’ve been trying to find a franchisee for three years.
“Some days we still make more money than they do. And except over Labor Day, we don’t make much money.”
“Wow,” the guy said. “I didn’t know that.”
“And now you do. How much rent is the Cannery Row Company asking for that location?”
“Seven thousand dollars a month –“
“Wow. And then there’s the cost of goods, and the actual franchise fee. I bet you’d have to clear fifteen thousand a month before you saw a cent –“
“My wife hates her job,” the guy said. “I mean really hates her job. So we thought maybe this –“
“It’s a long commute. Listen, I’m not telling you not to do it. But do the due diligence. Come down and stake out the store for a few days. Watch every single person who goes into the store, see what they do, figure out the browse-to-buy ratio. Maybe you clear a lot more than fifteen thousand dollars a month. I don’t know. But don’t let buying a business be an emotional decision.”
“You sound like you really know what you’re doing!” the guy said admiringly.
And I thought if only…
The organic bakery underneath Mystery Shopping Central disappeared one night. Ditto the Philly steak joint above Starbuck’s whose name I could never remember. The stained glass store on Foam Street is festooned with Everything Must Go banners. The cigar store, the pet boutique –
The place that used to be my favorite restaurant in Monterey – the Lighthouse Bistro – is now on its third makeover. I don’t know why they think a Texas-style BBQ joint will succeed where an Irish bar didn't. We're far away from Dublin. We’re far away from San Antonio.
One good thing happened anyway. The Little Store has a sometimes monopoly on the Best Damn BBQ Sauce in the entire world. It’s called Bad Daddy’s, a guy named Gerry makes it.
Gerry first walked into the store on a cold October night in 2004. He was tall, built like a bull and shaved his head. He stopped by the barbecue sauce shelves. “How do you find all these sauces anyway?”
I shrugged. “Oh, the usual ways. Catalogues, internet searches, trade shows, word of mouth. People send us things.”
“I make a barbecue sauce,” he said.
Lots of people make barbecue sauce. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s nothing special.
“I make the Best Damn BBQ Sauce in the world,” he said.
I’d heard that before.
The next night he showed up at the store again with a couple of Mason jars.
“Good label, huh?”
“That’s you,” I said, peering at it.
“The original Bad Daddy!” he cackled. “I’m moving right now so I’m not around much. But I’ll check back with you in a couple of weeks, see how you like it.”
I liked it very much. In fact, it was best sweet, spicy Kentucky/Tennessee-style sauce I'd ever used. Simply fantastic. When he got back to me, I was going to buy a couple of cases.
Except he didn’t get back to me. Not for months and months.
I finally had to blog about him to get him to get back to me. Like most narcissists, I figured he Googled himself by every nickname at least once a week.
So began a rather frustrating business relationship. Bad Daddy’s sold extremely well for us and sometimes Gerry would be around to make us more and sometimes he would be off having a life crisis – a life crisis that generally involved him losing his job, getting drunk and waking up in a ditch, a life crisis that prevented him from cooking up Bad Daddy’s for an indefinite period of time.
This June he lost another job. Simultaneously his long-suffering girlfriend finally had enough and dumped him. Gerry stopped answering his phone and email, and try as I might, I couldn’t reorder. June is not a good time to run out of a popular barbecue sauce. The hoards of people who came to the store for Bad Daddy’s got miffed when they couldn’t buy it.
“Maybe we’ll carry it again and maybe we won’t,” I would tell them truthfully when they asked.
This is not an answer that potential customers can relate to. Most stalked out in a rage without buying anything.
But there was his one couple who kept coming back. And who showed up yesterday for the fourteenth time.
“So. Has Bad Daddy recovered from his most recent crisis?” the man asked hopefully.
“I’ve given up on calling him," I sighed. "I guess I'll have to take it off the website. But wait – I have an idea. Let's call him together. You game?"
They were.
So we all got on the speakerphone and I dialed Gerry's number. "Gerry, I want Bad Daddy! Gerry, I need Bad Daddy! But don't take my word for it. Listen up!"
"Dude," said the man who'd come into the store, "you make the Best Damn BBQ Sauce in the world and it would be a real shame if you stopped making it. That sauce is your contract with God, man. Kobe Bryant plays basketball, Tom Waits sings and you make barbecue sauce. Do whatever you gotta do, but make some more."
Ten minutes after the couple left the store the phone rang and it was Gerry.
"Guess I'm back in the sauce business again," he said. "How many cases you want?"
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