Tale of a Small Town Retailer

My 80-year old father started up a contemporary furniture boutique in 1959, and has weathered the cyclical and catastrophic ups and downs of his local Buffalo, NY, economy -- particularly the 1970s when Buffalo dropped from a top 20 metro market to a top 50. That slide represented population -- and dollars lost. Never large enough to expend huge dollars in advertising, he reached out to neighboring Toronto and Rochester by placing ads in the local YellowPages.

His turning point was the web. In 1995, his son-in-law John Kenyon and I put his store on the web, and for the next 13 years, the online drove the success of the store. The last 12 months have been a tough one for a luxury retailer -- although ironically enough, the local economy is doing pretty well. So online sales are down, and not wanting to stand still, the family business is looking to put a satellite store into a local shopping mall which attracts nearly 20,000 a day, 20 percent Canadian. The purpose of the store is to be a representative outpost of the larger, more secluded location.

The objective of this post is to show how real-world retailers, small business owners who represent employment for more than 50 percent of the population, are grappling with high costs of advertising and declining margins. When we in the media industry get together to pontificate -- we forget about this half of the equation: the small business owner.

In the past it made better sense to go for the long-ball, as these folks could be a pain in the ass to service, since they money they spend is usually their own -- and they are more emotionally tied to results. However, with the winds of change, the ball ain't sailing out of the park like it used to and media is forced to figure out how to serve that other half. But here's the thing, that other half doesn't feel they have a lot of viable, affordable and effective options when it comes to getting their messages out there. My dad's business is lucky; he had a son-in-law who understood the vision of the 'Net and a daughter in the digital business and the combination yielded a top-notch site long before others thought to get an email address. Many others his size didn't have the vision or know-how.

For newspapers and magazines to thrive on the web, they need to figure out how to serve this end of the market: the folks who would rather spend $500 a day to open a second location to reach 20,000 people daily -- because they aren't sure that $150,000 in advertising will yield the same results.