Adios Slow Burn
Feb. 12th, 2009 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSo-o-o, I’m closing the Little Store as of the end of February.
I’m sad. Very sad. Heartbroken, you might say.
But it’s certainly the right decision.
“I can’t pay the rent,” I told Bill Grimm a/k/a the Cannery Row Company bagman flatly on the phone yesterday. “The store isn’t making any money. What business we did have in January mostly came from Internet sales. It isn’t that people aren’t coming into the store or coming in and then not buying things. It’s that there are no people on Cannery Row.”
“Well, you’re just wrong,” Bill Grimm blustered. “It’s just your store that isn’t making any money. Other businesses are doing fine. I have the January figures. They’re up from January ’08.”
Huh?
I mean I’ve sat in the Little Store and watched all the other businesses for signs of life. When two people wander into the store in 8 hours, there’s very little else to do. Where are all these other sales coming from? Did the Invisible Man take his Invisible Octuplets on a Cannery Row shopping spree? Or maybe the 700 Building opens on to a Space/Time Portal. Even as I type, thousands of alien shopaholics are materializing inside the doors of the Sunglass Hut, the Sand Dollar, Alamo Flags, plundering their shelves.
Or maybe Bill Grimm is cherry picking his statistics. I can believe the Harley store’s sales are up. They only opened last year and it seems like every guy in the world wants to own stuff emblazoned with the Harley insignia. They’re all rugged individualists. Don’t believe me? Read their teeshirts. I can also believe the candy store’s sales are up because, hello! you drag the kids on a three-hour car ride, you have to buy them something. Two thousand square feet of barrels filled with candy! Kid paradise! No price tags on that candy either, so by the time your kid has filled up his basket and the guy at the cash register tells you it’s $22 a pound it’s waaaay too late to back.
But I can’t believe anybody else is making money. I think Bill Grimm is delusional.
And yes of course, I’m a complete failure and maybe I can arrange to get hit by a truck today since suicide isn’t an option – too tough on the kids. I don’t matter, my life is pointless.
My fault.
My responsibility.
BUT… I think the Cannery Row Company fucked me. Was it legal? Sure. But unethical.
First of all despite taking a hefty chunk out of the incidental expenses they charge us -- above and beyond the actual rent -- for advertising, they do no fucking advertising.
And then... For two whole years the Cannery Row Company closed Cannery Row down so they could build their new hotel. We were told they were building the new hotel. We were told it would take ten months. We were not told that Ted Balestreri and Burt Cutino had managed to manipulate those spineless creeps who pretend to be the mayor and the city council into shutting down the actual streets. You bet this had an effect on sales.
Our rent wasn’t reduced though. Frankly an ethical landlord would have reduced the rent.
For two whole years we struggled to survive. Gonna be worth it! we were told. More tourists! Rich tourists.
This was the period during which I signed my second lease. In retrospect I shouldn’t have. But the Little Store had done so well its 1st 15 months and I really loved it and I wanted to believe sleazy Bill Grimm when he prattled on and on about how good times were just around that bend.
The hotel was finally finished in July 2008. And then the price of gas shot up. Monterey isn’t on the way to anywhere else, it’s a destination you have to want to go to. And nobody did. Tourism was way down. Again – purely anecdotal observation. I can’t find any official statistics. The closest proxy would be Aquarium attendance but those stats are kept in an underwater vault guarded by white sharks.
We did half the sales in July 2008 that we did in July 2007.
From that point on we were fucked, and it was only a matter of time. I loved my customers, I felt like the store was a magical sanctuary in a crusty gray Universe. I kept trying. But I knew the rent reduction the Cannery Row offered me in November wasn't going to work unless they also waived the rent for January & February. And they weren't going to do that. January and February are always dead. This year has been a lot more moribund than last. It’s always been the July money that's gotten us through the winter slump. But this year there wasn’t any.
So. We’re through. I'm hysterical right now but in a few days I'll be relieved. It’s been a heavy, heavy load to tote.
Just one more recital of a story that will be told over and over and over again in the next few years. The US of A's bedtime story, you might say.
Because the economy isn’t getting any better. In fact all indications seem to point to the economy getting worse. Even assuming Keynes was right and this stimulus package does what it’s supposed to do, it’s still a Ponzi scheme. Who gets left holding the bag? Well some of them – your children and mine – have already been born. Most of them haven’t.
Plus a hit bigger than the foreclosure crisis is just around the corner though nobody’s talking about it. I refer, of course, to Boomer retirement. Just what happens when Boomers start clamoring for their social security? How do Barack and the Obamatrons intend to pay for that?
I voted for Obama and I continue to like him on a personal level – he feels like a peer somehow, someone with whom I could have an interesting conversation about, say, jazz or the explosive growth of the Indian middle class. I approve of his decision to close Guantanamo. I disapprove of his cabinet appointments. I think his lack of administrative experience is taking a big juicy bite out of his ass right now viz his economic policies although to be fair, the same would be true of John McCain. Senators make lousy presidents, they have no practical fiscal experience.
A federal government as deeply leveraged and indebted as ours is right now is simply making the wrong decision to go more deeply into debt. It makes no sense.
I’m sad. Very sad. Heartbroken, you might say.
But it’s certainly the right decision.
“I can’t pay the rent,” I told Bill Grimm a/k/a the Cannery Row Company bagman flatly on the phone yesterday. “The store isn’t making any money. What business we did have in January mostly came from Internet sales. It isn’t that people aren’t coming into the store or coming in and then not buying things. It’s that there are no people on Cannery Row.”
“Well, you’re just wrong,” Bill Grimm blustered. “It’s just your store that isn’t making any money. Other businesses are doing fine. I have the January figures. They’re up from January ’08.”
Huh?
I mean I’ve sat in the Little Store and watched all the other businesses for signs of life. When two people wander into the store in 8 hours, there’s very little else to do. Where are all these other sales coming from? Did the Invisible Man take his Invisible Octuplets on a Cannery Row shopping spree? Or maybe the 700 Building opens on to a Space/Time Portal. Even as I type, thousands of alien shopaholics are materializing inside the doors of the Sunglass Hut, the Sand Dollar, Alamo Flags, plundering their shelves.
Or maybe Bill Grimm is cherry picking his statistics. I can believe the Harley store’s sales are up. They only opened last year and it seems like every guy in the world wants to own stuff emblazoned with the Harley insignia. They’re all rugged individualists. Don’t believe me? Read their teeshirts. I can also believe the candy store’s sales are up because, hello! you drag the kids on a three-hour car ride, you have to buy them something. Two thousand square feet of barrels filled with candy! Kid paradise! No price tags on that candy either, so by the time your kid has filled up his basket and the guy at the cash register tells you it’s $22 a pound it’s waaaay too late to back.
But I can’t believe anybody else is making money. I think Bill Grimm is delusional.
And yes of course, I’m a complete failure and maybe I can arrange to get hit by a truck today since suicide isn’t an option – too tough on the kids. I don’t matter, my life is pointless.
My fault.
My responsibility.
BUT… I think the Cannery Row Company fucked me. Was it legal? Sure. But unethical.
First of all despite taking a hefty chunk out of the incidental expenses they charge us -- above and beyond the actual rent -- for advertising, they do no fucking advertising.
And then... For two whole years the Cannery Row Company closed Cannery Row down so they could build their new hotel. We were told they were building the new hotel. We were told it would take ten months. We were not told that Ted Balestreri and Burt Cutino had managed to manipulate those spineless creeps who pretend to be the mayor and the city council into shutting down the actual streets. You bet this had an effect on sales.
Our rent wasn’t reduced though. Frankly an ethical landlord would have reduced the rent.
For two whole years we struggled to survive. Gonna be worth it! we were told. More tourists! Rich tourists.
This was the period during which I signed my second lease. In retrospect I shouldn’t have. But the Little Store had done so well its 1st 15 months and I really loved it and I wanted to believe sleazy Bill Grimm when he prattled on and on about how good times were just around that bend.
The hotel was finally finished in July 2008. And then the price of gas shot up. Monterey isn’t on the way to anywhere else, it’s a destination you have to want to go to. And nobody did. Tourism was way down. Again – purely anecdotal observation. I can’t find any official statistics. The closest proxy would be Aquarium attendance but those stats are kept in an underwater vault guarded by white sharks.
We did half the sales in July 2008 that we did in July 2007.
From that point on we were fucked, and it was only a matter of time. I loved my customers, I felt like the store was a magical sanctuary in a crusty gray Universe. I kept trying. But I knew the rent reduction the Cannery Row offered me in November wasn't going to work unless they also waived the rent for January & February. And they weren't going to do that. January and February are always dead. This year has been a lot more moribund than last. It’s always been the July money that's gotten us through the winter slump. But this year there wasn’t any.
So. We’re through. I'm hysterical right now but in a few days I'll be relieved. It’s been a heavy, heavy load to tote.
Just one more recital of a story that will be told over and over and over again in the next few years. The US of A's bedtime story, you might say.
Because the economy isn’t getting any better. In fact all indications seem to point to the economy getting worse. Even assuming Keynes was right and this stimulus package does what it’s supposed to do, it’s still a Ponzi scheme. Who gets left holding the bag? Well some of them – your children and mine – have already been born. Most of them haven’t.
Plus a hit bigger than the foreclosure crisis is just around the corner though nobody’s talking about it. I refer, of course, to Boomer retirement. Just what happens when Boomers start clamoring for their social security? How do Barack and the Obamatrons intend to pay for that?
I voted for Obama and I continue to like him on a personal level – he feels like a peer somehow, someone with whom I could have an interesting conversation about, say, jazz or the explosive growth of the Indian middle class. I approve of his decision to close Guantanamo. I disapprove of his cabinet appointments. I think his lack of administrative experience is taking a big juicy bite out of his ass right now viz his economic policies although to be fair, the same would be true of John McCain. Senators make lousy presidents, they have no practical fiscal experience.
A federal government as deeply leveraged and indebted as ours is right now is simply making the wrong decision to go more deeply into debt. It makes no sense.
