It's A Grind

Just received e-mail word today that my local coffee emporium, It’s A Grind, is closing, another victim of the downturn although I suspect that its location between Office Depot and Home Depot (both of which are struggling) didn’t help much in terms of traffic. This is the second store shut-down right in my neighborhood (in addition to a few eateries, but I don’t count them as that industry is notoriously unstable in the best of times).

Both the coffee shop and the other store, a gift shop, give me an immediate human face to the effects of billion-dollar greed we’ve been infected by. While the growth-at-any-cost big boys have been defrauding us at the macro level, I feel most acutely the micro-level effect of students losing their part time jobs making coffee and the loss of the shop owner who used to call me when her new candle shipment arrived. I know they are the tip of a very large iceberg that threatens to sink us, but they are the most immediate for me and thus both symbolic and poignant. What’s worse, I don’t know who’s going next.

I suppose I should feel bad for all the stores closing and the jobs losses they represent—particularly the latter. I do, but I also remember a pattern I observed as a child. There was a bicycle shop I used to go to where I grew up. It was a good shop, well stocked, and the owner could repair everything from a broken spindle to flat tires and broken brakes. He was always cheerful and he knew us and our bicycles personally—“Now you’d better stop those wheelies and skidding,” he’d tell the boys, knowing very well that they weren’t about to listen. It was the kind of place you could count on, and that was important to kids who relied on our bikes. It was also the place you could go to dream and, if lucky, choose your Christmas present.

Well, one day the owner decided to open up in a neighboring town. Immediately, things changed. He became consumed with the challenges of operating two shops, and since he couldn’t be in both places it was soon clear how much the shop had relied on his personality. The new manager of the first one didn’t provide the same level of service to us kids and we stopped hanging out. Overnight, it was no longer a place to go and dream. When the owner finally realized that perhaps he should have just focused on what he did best, which was selling and fixing bicycles and working with customers rather than trying to manage multiple stores, he closed the second store. But by then he was so saddled with debt that he nearly lost the first one as well. He was never the same afterwards.

There's a message here, I think, about providing an essential servive and doing it well. When the owner changed from being someone who sold and repaired bicycles into a business man who managed multiple sites, he gave in to an idea of progress. In other words, he got greedy and forgot the essential nature of what he did.

In the scale of things, I am not going to grieve one fewer Macy’s or Zales or Circuit City. Once a business goes corporate it seems to lose its soul. It becomes an opportunity base for a professional cadre of managers whose credo seems to be the bigger I can make the company, the bigger my bonus, then the bigger the rising tide for investors. Well, we’ve seen where that gets us: The company stops focusing on products that people want to buy (cars, for example) and becomes consumed with its stock and investors. When the company shudders, the managers move on until the next carpet-bagger comes along with promises to restore Wall Street confidence. As a consumer, I couldn't care less about Wall Street: I want a car that gives good mileage and doesn't break down. I want someone to focus on me as the bicycle shop did.

My hope is that we’ve learned something from the economic mess around us but my sense of reality is that as long as people are all right personally they will find it convenient to pursue business as usual and just write off the small guys as collateral damage. That’s too bad, because I’m going to miss my local shops.