Turning Corners & New Directions

I expect to begin doing some online selling through this website over the next few weeks. I will start out with a few basic offerings, like our In-House designed Stickers and Greeting Cards, along with a few of my high sell-thru items and some Vintage. Hopefully, if all goes well, I can expand it fairly quickly. 

In the store itself, I find that while I have a number of base products that generally do well for me, I am still constantly re-imagining what I sell. I continue to endeavor to provide and market more eco-friendly and sustainable products, though I fall far short of my goals as of yet. In a small town gift shop that depends largely on tourist trade, it is very hard to maintain the standards I would like to see become the norm. Perhaps the online store will help in that area, but there are major drawbacks with that as well. 

Besides being basically horrible from an ecological standpoint, this “shop online” economy that has evolved out of the technical advances of the last several decades and swept around the world has decentralized communities, and encouraged the proliferation of a tourist or visitor centered economy. Catering to non-locals in order to stay in business is, more often than not, in direct opposition to a strong, locally supported business framework. When your local consumer base can order almost anything you can provide from Amazon or some other behemoth enterprise, with many more choices, and cheaper, it becomes about other things than quality and friendly service [though those are also necessary]. 

That said, a small town is dependent on its businesses, to draw visitors, to support the tax base, and to make it a Town rather than a Dot on the map. I believe that after some of the upheavals and economic setbacks in Fort Davis [and many other places as well] this last several years, this should be becoming evident.  We are a town deeply in need of a level of Community and economic interdependence that extends beyond just catering to Tourists, though it necessarily must do that also. 

It’s always easier to See the problems than to solve them. Perhaps though, pointing them out may serve some purpose. I would like to see the business community, first and foremost, support and encourage one another’s endeavors. I and others provide small discounts to “locals”, and I would like to see more of that. If it were economically feasible, I would like to do much more.