Visibility
Jul. 9th, 2003 07:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraCannery Row Company seems very eager to have my store – I'm not sure whether this is because the current occupants of the space, Christmas By the Bay, are muscling hard to break their lease (they have another store a hundred yards away fronting Cannery Row itself) or because they think the business model is hot. Maybe a combination of both?
"We were wondering whether you might be ready to open August 1," says the real estate agent. John Breedlove.
"I'm open to considering it," I say.
"I'll start working on the letter of intent today."
Opening August 1 would be impossible, of course – as of right now I have no inventory, no plan for retail space and display and no equipment. But possibly I could get it all together by August 10. Downside to this is an incredible amount of work crammed into four weeks. Upside is that I can catch the end of the booming summer tourist crop. Parking is miserable in Cannery Row so luring locals becomes problematic. This is a definite down to that location: my business plan – a work in progress – calls for some penetration into the local market.
So that my sales forecasts won't be science fiction, I spent five hours yesterday lurking outside The Garlic Shoppe, my closest competitor in the exciting, high-power world of hot sauce. The Garlic Shoppe does a booming business – eleven hundred browsers, sixty purchases, average expenditure, say, of twelve bucks a pop for a grand total of a little over seven hundred bucks. Not bad for a Tuesday afternoon. There's money to be made.
Still, the Cannery depresses me unutterably. A kind of sharklike predatory ambiance floats over the shiny store displays, the subtext being that the best fun to be had anywhere is spending money – preferably on stuff you don't need. There's a John Steinbeck Wax Museum and two (count 'em) galleries devoted to the fine art of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light. An entire store devoted to celebrity bobble-heads. Numerous stores selling candy out of barrels for fifteen dollars a pound. Around the corner a Tom Hanks lookalike poses on a bench outside Bubba Gumps restaurant. You loved the movie, now thrill to the overpriced, undercooked food.
And yet the tourists just eat this stuff up. There's a feverish glint in their eyes as they reach for their credit cards. Some kind of subliminal "buy" signal, floating like poison gas in the air. In-fucking-credible.
The store space I'm considering overlooks San Carlos Beach, an erstwhile China Point. In the 1850's the Chinese began immigrating to the Monterey Bay area, bypassing the Angel Island checkpoints, sailing their junks directly to the target shores off which vast fisheries of squid and abalone flourished. They built settlements of scavenged wood along the beaches. By 1906, the real estate had become valuable and anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant. A mysterious fire destroyed the fishing village at China Point, and in my imagination at least, a few decades later, one of the things that Steinbeck found when he wandered through the tidepools was the bones of dead Chinese.
Sort of the Central California Coast variant on the ancient Indian cemetery meme, I suppose: no good can come of things built on this land…
Anyway, sales forecasts or no, I'm rather tired of lurking invisibly. Watched The Godfather for the upteenth time a couple of nights go. Parts 1 and 2. In Part 2, the Craven Senator beats a hooker to death and the intermediary Mafiosi's words of comfort are something along the lines of, "Who cares what happens to her? She has no family."
And I thought: Right. Just like me now. Ben in the remote wilds of the Maritime Provinces, apparently beyond the reach of phone or email. Max in Southern California, sunk deep into depression over his vanishing prospects for fall football. Did manage to connect with Robin in Rochester this morning. His small, bored voice: yeah, yeah, I love you too, Mommy – now get off the phone so I can watch cartoons.
Sometimes it's all I can do not to pack up a few clothes, the dog and some books, pick some arbitrary place with an exotic-sounding name off the map, get in the van and drive. Disappear myself.
I'm sick of all this left brain stuff. Really want to start writing again.
"We were wondering whether you might be ready to open August 1," says the real estate agent. John Breedlove.
"I'm open to considering it," I say.
"I'll start working on the letter of intent today."
Opening August 1 would be impossible, of course – as of right now I have no inventory, no plan for retail space and display and no equipment. But possibly I could get it all together by August 10. Downside to this is an incredible amount of work crammed into four weeks. Upside is that I can catch the end of the booming summer tourist crop. Parking is miserable in Cannery Row so luring locals becomes problematic. This is a definite down to that location: my business plan – a work in progress – calls for some penetration into the local market.
So that my sales forecasts won't be science fiction, I spent five hours yesterday lurking outside The Garlic Shoppe, my closest competitor in the exciting, high-power world of hot sauce. The Garlic Shoppe does a booming business – eleven hundred browsers, sixty purchases, average expenditure, say, of twelve bucks a pop for a grand total of a little over seven hundred bucks. Not bad for a Tuesday afternoon. There's money to be made.
Still, the Cannery depresses me unutterably. A kind of sharklike predatory ambiance floats over the shiny store displays, the subtext being that the best fun to be had anywhere is spending money – preferably on stuff you don't need. There's a John Steinbeck Wax Museum and two (count 'em) galleries devoted to the fine art of Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light. An entire store devoted to celebrity bobble-heads. Numerous stores selling candy out of barrels for fifteen dollars a pound. Around the corner a Tom Hanks lookalike poses on a bench outside Bubba Gumps restaurant. You loved the movie, now thrill to the overpriced, undercooked food.
And yet the tourists just eat this stuff up. There's a feverish glint in their eyes as they reach for their credit cards. Some kind of subliminal "buy" signal, floating like poison gas in the air. In-fucking-credible.
The store space I'm considering overlooks San Carlos Beach, an erstwhile China Point. In the 1850's the Chinese began immigrating to the Monterey Bay area, bypassing the Angel Island checkpoints, sailing their junks directly to the target shores off which vast fisheries of squid and abalone flourished. They built settlements of scavenged wood along the beaches. By 1906, the real estate had become valuable and anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant. A mysterious fire destroyed the fishing village at China Point, and in my imagination at least, a few decades later, one of the things that Steinbeck found when he wandered through the tidepools was the bones of dead Chinese.
Sort of the Central California Coast variant on the ancient Indian cemetery meme, I suppose: no good can come of things built on this land…
Anyway, sales forecasts or no, I'm rather tired of lurking invisibly. Watched The Godfather for the upteenth time a couple of nights go. Parts 1 and 2. In Part 2, the Craven Senator beats a hooker to death and the intermediary Mafiosi's words of comfort are something along the lines of, "Who cares what happens to her? She has no family."
And I thought: Right. Just like me now. Ben in the remote wilds of the Maritime Provinces, apparently beyond the reach of phone or email. Max in Southern California, sunk deep into depression over his vanishing prospects for fall football. Did manage to connect with Robin in Rochester this morning. His small, bored voice: yeah, yeah, I love you too, Mommy – now get off the phone so I can watch cartoons.
Sometimes it's all I can do not to pack up a few clothes, the dog and some books, pick some arbitrary place with an exotic-sounding name off the map, get in the van and drive. Disappear myself.
I'm sick of all this left brain stuff. Really want to start writing again.
