GOING OUT OF BUSINESS SALE: everything is regular price for the next 20 months!! Then it all goes away, for whatever we can get for it.
We thought it would be fair to give everyone a lot of notice that we won’t be renewing our lease when it runs out at the end of July, 2015.
Yes. That is a long time from now. But since we still get customers who have found us because they couldn’t remember where Starwind was and googled for them, only to be surprised that they’ve been closed for 20 years, or others who don’t realize that it was 8 years between stores for us, a little advance notice might be helpful.
Before you freak out, there are two options: one, we just close our doors and vanish forever, and two, we buy a building and own it instead of paying rent every month.
The building we are currently in is not, at the moment, for sale. And at the moment, we are not in a position to make an offer on it. But the rent is very high and while it is a fair deal, we’re only using half the space, making it double what we’d like to be paying.
Chances are we will shut the doors forever. So consider this your notice that we will probably go away forever, never to be heard from again, moved away to do something to earn a paycheck (because I’m not getting one right now). BUT it isn’t too late for something crazy to happen, and to become successful enough to save up for a building of our own.
We opened in September 2012 knowing that this venture was very risky, the economy still very fragile. We’ve done okay for most months, but several things have really poked holes in our growth this year and it’s caused us to adjust our five-year plan in significant ways.
First, the tornado in May 2013. We’d had steady growth, did well over the Christmas holidays, managed to keep afloat and grow just a little every week. But when the tornado hit May 20th, many people gave away their paychecks to the Red Cross or other charities, and sales dropped by about 25% which, for us, meant the difference between staying afloat (rent, restocking, payroll, and introducing new merchandise) and stagnation. This continued through June and did not turn around until July.
This affected quite a few businesses and restaurants in the Oklahoma City metro area. Personally, I approve of people helping their fellow citizens, so although the slowdown sucked I was all right with it. Helping others was more important than buying incense and jewelry. But where we had enjoyed growing into a self-supporting (minus a paycheck for me) business, this made things pretty tight, slowed us down a lot.
We did very well over the summer. August was an amazing month; I was actually in tears of joy when I ran the figures because it looked like this might actually be a successful venture. Sales were almost double from the month before and it was sooo easy to hope that our time had finally come, that we’d finally reached an equilibrium and would be able to put more stuff on our shelves (and get more shelves too). We bought several new product lines and fixtures and discontinued almost all of the consignment stuff, fixed some things that needed fixing, paid off a little debt, got current on things we’d been behind on.
The beginning of September is always slow as people go back to school and pay off their summer vacations; September is usually the slowest month for a shop like ours. But then the fools in government decided to be difficult, leading to a shutdown. The news picked up on this mid-September and we slowly watched our sales dwindle down to pretty much nothing for the next eight weeks as people got more and more uncomfortable about the looming shutdown and “fiscal cliff” issues.
People just stopped… spending… money. This happened all over the country – it wasn’t just us. Most people were not fiscally affected by the shutdown, they don’t work for the government, they kept going to work and getting paychecks. But for some reason, they just quit shopping and eating out, staying away from retail and restaurants and services (like home and auto repair) in droves.
November has been a little more stable, but we’ve had several days either closed or super slow due to bad weather (thanks, Mutha Nature, we really didn’t need that ICE last week) so that just added a nice dollop of bad luck on top of everything else.
Honestly this has all seriously kicked our ass. We are struggling, as I write this, to figure out where our rent money is going to come from. The post-Thanksgiving sales have been pretty nice but the heat coming off my rent check when I mail it next week is going to melt the mailbox. I’m pretty sure that a lot of this month’s rent money is going to come our of household grocery and utility money, which is so not cool.
I am okay with not taking a paycheck for a year while the business grows and stabilizes. But we passed our one-year anniversary in September and since then it’s just been a downhill slide into frustration and financial stress. I’m also three months behind on paying my sales tax (I needed it for rent), so now I’m in debt with the Tax Commission, something that can actually get our business license yanked, so that is going to have to get into compliance very soon.
But like I said, a lot can happen between now and the end of the lease. Economists are predicting that this is going to be a slow Christmas season (I’d settle for just getting my head above water again!), but that first quarter 2014 will pick up after the potential for government nonsense is over (a repeated shutdown threat and “fiscal cliff” threat will be over early February), after which people should be feeling a little more secure and money should be flowing a little more smoothly.
When we hit that turn around, we have a lot of lost ground to cover. I have so many different product lines to bring in, an entire room to furnish and stock, two more showcases to add to the front room and fill with neat minerals and jewelry! So many plans for nifty merchandise, not seeing fruition right now, it’s so frustrating. This stuff should have been brought in before the summer, now I don’t know if it will be here before next summer.
But the single most significant factor for the decision to not renew the lease is that month after month, not only am I not getting a paycheck, I am not working toward any kind of compensation. If we own our building, that’s a heck of an asset, we can rent or sell it later on. But to give away so much money as rent is just making me grind my teeth, especially when times are tough. I have no wiggle room, I can’t make payment arrangements, I don’t have any kind of options that as a mortgage holder I would have.
I know our customers feel like they need a store like this, but they sometimes don’t seem to understand that ALL of our expenses are paid from the income we make on things people buy. Even if a customer will make a commitment to buy $15 of stuff every other month, that is really helpful for our long-term stability. This is something important for every small business right now. If you like a place and want it to stay in business, you need to give them money.
Let me repeat that:
IF YOU WANT A BUSINESS TO THRIVE, GO THERE AND SPEND MONEY **REGULARLY**.
We can’t do it without you. The job itself is not reward enough, there must be financial reasons to keep getting out of bed and turning on the lights, dusting the shelves, keeping up the altar, making new stuff for you.
Until the end, though, we’re going to treat it just like we did yesterday and the day before and the week before that. We won’t give up, we won’t phone it in, we won’t let things slide as the days count down. We’re hoping to get a building, not a job as an accountant or JC Penney’s store manager.
