It occurred to me the other day as I was driving down Colorado Boulevard that, east of Old Town anyway, the majority of the businesses on Colorado are non-chain, locally-owned specialty stores. Some of them, like Fedde’s fine furniture, Vroman’s bookstore, and Dino’s Italian Inn, have been in Pasadena for years, are large and have established reputations. Others, like Pita Pita restaurant, the Comics Factory, and Zephyr must have popped quietly into existence sometime recently when I wasn’t looking. These businesses make up a huge percentage of the spaces along Colorado, and I hope they are thriving. I think I used to wonder how they stayed in business, and who patronized them when they could be going someplace bigger instead. I didn’t know what I was missing.
It just never occurred to me as I was growing up, and more specifically coming of an age to consume things with my own purchasing power, to go into the smaller local stores. Mainly it was just more convenient, to my impatient young self, to go to one of the huge national resellers like Best Buy or Target. But I even suppose that on a more subconscious level I looked at the local joints and saw clutter, obscurity…outdated-ness. This was without ever really having set foot inside them, so I don’t know where that impression might have come from. Being young, I suppose the bright flashy colors and promise of everything I could possibly dream of, in stock and uniformly displayed at perfect intervals and heights for my grabbing hands, sucked me into the mega-chains (and the pages of Amazon.com) and made everything else look dim by comparison. I didn’t think about price or know-how, I guess I just wanted to ditch my allowance as quickly and painlessly as possible in order to get the goodies. I was young and stupid, and bought things accordingly at the appropriate retailers.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve moved away from just wanting the latest stuff, to wanting particular things, in a prudent fashion, relevant to my own income and with a knowledgeable, friendly staff ready to advise me on their purchase. Moreover, I’ve had plenty of experience with not being able to find things that suit my more obscure, eclectic, refined (I don’t mean refined in the sense of snooty or expensive, I just mean…less pre-programmed, and also more informed). tastes in the big stores.
The most obvious example of this has been the complete historic absence of anything Mac-related in stores like Best Buy and Target, and the mediocre Apple sales knowledge at places like CompUSA. At big chain stores, someone just decided that everyone was going to own a PC. Having Mac stuff there, back in the stone age of computing before things were cross-platform, was perhaps just too confusing to the average Windows home user who stumbled in and bought the first accessory they saw on the shelf and then had to return it because it was intended for Apple. So someone higher up in the stores, seeing all the returns, just decided to dispense with the confusion and go PC-only. I suffered, in my consumer state, because of this decision. And the decision-making must be even more arbitrary with other things in other stores, like books and music. As far as I can tell, big stores just go by what’s at the top of the charts for each particular genre to ensure that they’ll make the most money. But the average big-store employee hasn’t even heard of, or heard/read half the titles that his own store carries, and even fewer have the power to get stuff that isn’t there into stock if you ask them to.
What’s more, national specialty store does not equal local specialty store; in related incidents it’s been the fact that some guy tried to sell me support-less Puma fashion shoes as running shoes at a Big 5, that I can’t find my favorite bands’ albums at Borders or Tower, or that I just can’t get tae kwon do or archery supplies at Academy Broadway, that make me look elsewhere. To go back to the Apple example, you can’t get good support for them at the big chains and SOMETIMES even at their own Apple Stores*. And the more I know, personally, about the things I’m buying, the more I need even smarter salespeople off of whom to bounce my informed questions. It’s gotten to the point that I figure the best place to start, even before the internet (who wants to pay shipping?), to find almost anything, is a little, local store.
Let me tell you something. Small, local stores are where it’s at. I know, I know, this is no big news to the anti-chain, non-mainstream crowd. But on a non-ideological, practical level, it should be news to anyone who has previously gone to Best Buy or Target looking for informed help, or who normally sees big stores as more convenient or likely to have something in stock right when one walks in the door. I don’t know why I never gave small stores a second thought when I was younger; they are the best resource EVER, because only by walking into a small store can you stand where decisions about ordering and selling are made, IN THE SAME PLACE.
Walk into your local supply, book, grocery or hardware store and you won’t just find someone who knows what you’re looking for, you’ll likely also find the very person who ordered it for the store, who once needed it, too. You’ll find hobbyists who turned their love into their profession. You’ll also find the gal who’s been working there for ten years, who was working there back when whatever you’re looking for was first invented/created/written, and who was in fact the first one to demo/try/fix/read it and knows why it’s as awesome as it is (because she can remember back before it was around). You’ll find people willing to order things for you even if they don’t have them in stock. And you’ll find the weird guy from the neighborhood who has no job and just hangs out in the store all day who knows every obscure fact there is to know about the thing you’re looking for and is happy to share.
You might even meet the cat who walked in off the street one day and now lives behind the counter, and get a free cute animal stress-reduction moment of a kind that Best Buy’s sterile policies can’t begin to allow.
Other than their people pluses, small, local stores are actually much more likely to offer unusual discounts or haggle over pricing with you. They may not be able to match the big chains’ pricing on some things, but then they often offer deals on groupings of items or older stock that the big stores can’t even consider, with their rigid company policies. And the longer you’ve been coming in to a small store, the more of a relationship you have with them, the better these deals get. At the very least, you’ll be able to deal with the same salesperson, or someone who knows her, whenever you come in. At big chains you’re lucky to get anyone to help you on a given day, much less the same person two months apart. In my experience many big-store employees are there on a temporary basis, passing through on their way to other jobs, or paying the bills while they go to school. Their training has been minimal and mass-produced. Small stores are much more likely to have a specialized, knowledgeable, and permanent staff. Their employees have been there longer and are more likely to have seen your particular problem before.
And surprisingly, even though small and understaffed, they will tend to have more time for you. You’ve been let in on a big secret: more customers are at the big places, fewer customers take the time to find the store, so if you do take the extra step and make it in, you’ll be rewarded with more salespeople free to help you.
At this point I must admit that I have something of a vested interest in this topic: I work for a small Apple reseller. The store’s been around for 25 years, I’ve worked there for one. But much of what I speak of here I did not know until I worked for a small store, and I can’t believe that I didn’t. It’s just so much more human, dedicated, and interesting here. Since starting work at my store, I’ve made a point of trying out some of the other small businesses and restaurants in Pasadena, including those on Colorado Boulevard, and they are far and away better than the big stuff. I now have my own personal vacuum, art supply, computer game, violin-making, and video rental consultants, some of whom know me by my first name, all thanks to the local store community.
Local stores need you, too. They may well be under-stocked, dingier, and have a less-than-prime location, but there is a reason for this: rents are high in the best locations, it takes money to keep all the latest stuff in inventory, it takes money to keep yourself looking like a Best Buy or a Starbucks. Small stores throw everything they get into keeping the highest-quality stuff, and that includes staff. It takes extra throwaway money to come up with cool window dressings and loud displays. We, as consumers, are the source of that money. But by and large we just don’t think, and we go pay for the drive-thru mentality of Target and Best Buy. And then, until we learn better, we wonder why we aren’t getting better service, aren’t finding that obscure crunchy snack from back home in Alabama, aren’t able to keep using our computer when it’s just three years old, and aren’t even seeing anyone with a nametag, in all the festive aisles or pages of links, who can answer why.
*Much as I love them, I’m not about to toe Apple’s company line about them being more artsy or obscure or the underdog; though Apple is a victim of brand bias where major retailers are concerned, they’re still a Big Brand (how they’re silently muscling their own non-company resellers out of the market is a topic for another article).
