If you own or work for a local business, these are tough times. From Thanksgiving through St. Patrick’s Day, some small businesses have to lay off staff, cut hours, slow down on purchasing or even give up and close. I’ve seen it happen year after year — winter is hard on commerce.
It catches some by surprise; if you visit a bustling small town in a typical Sonoma County July and see a lot of activity, you can’t imagine how quiet those sidewalks are in February, and some enthusiastic souls trade business planning and demographic research for unbridled optimism.
While we have a lot of sophisticated folks and ideas, we still have deep agricultural roots, and in that world, winter is a time to slow down, catch up on chores, and build your strength for the promise of spring and the energy of summer.
If you’re a small business in Sonoma County, it takes planning, flexibility and a little luck to get through the winter, when your revenue slows down, but you still have rent, overhead, insurance payments and employees counting on you.
Some take time off — it was a personal trial for me to know that my favorite bakeries in Freestone and Healdsburg were closed at the same time — but I know it made sense and made the winter more manageable.
Hardware and grocery stores seem to do all right — especially in this pandemic-altered reality, when food and home improvement are major sources of entertainment — but restaurants, shops and personal services have been hammered, hard.
Do small, locally owned businesses matter to you? They pay taxes that are then used to fill potholes, hire firefighters and keep our water clean and our sewage moving.
Small businesses hire our friends and neighbors, and the kids of our friends and neighbors. If there was ever a time to show some love, it’s right now. That take-out meal, that gift, that haircut … might make a difference between making it through winter or giving up.
And yet, while some businesses have already been driven away by circumstance or time, others are ready to invest in our community. New ideas are taking hold in our COVID-emptied storefronts.
On that topic, there’s a longtime trend in retail that I would like to squash — the tradition of papering over the windows while a shop is remodeled and making us wait to find out what’s happening there next.
If your new business is behind that blank paper on a downtown street — you should know that non-specific anticipation is out of fashion. 2020 deleted our love of surprises, and it’s just irritating to see those unbranded windows.
Viral marketing is the new rule — you can get tons of free publicity by putting up a little sign to let us know what’s coming.
Ray Holley used to like surprises. Now, not so much. He can be reached at ra*******@gm***.com
