Retail will churn: Deal with it

Thayer Street, Providence

-- Photo by Infrogmation

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' in GoLocal24.com:

The current issue of East Side Monthly, which serves Providence upscale neighborhood, hasa long article by Amanda Grosvenor is about Thayer Street, on Providence’s College Hill. The basic theme is that the street, long seen as Providence’s Harvard Square because of the proximity of Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design, has become less“edgy’’ and “funky’’ as some of the quirky stores have moved out and other, presumably more boring stores and, especially, restaurants, have moved in. Indeed, it’s now mostly a restaurant strip.

But such changes never stop.  Retail is always a churn.

My wife and I first lived in Providence in the late ‘70s, before exiling ourselves to France, and remember that back then, the street was rather stodgy, not edgy, with shops (or “shoppes”) appealing to “blue-haired ladies.’’

The biggest Thayer Street retail disaster in recent years was the closing of the College Hill Bookstore, a wonderful place to browse and buy. It had a much more interesting collection of booksand periodicals than the nearby Brown Bookstore, which has been sliding into mediocrity for years. The College Hill Bookstore’s owner, local real-estate mogul Ken Dulgarian, decided that he could make more money with another tenant, Spectrum India, which sells boring (to me) cheap clothes, jewelry and other stuff generally associated with the Subcontinent and/or retro hippies.

But bless Mr. Dulgarian for keeping the high-end, intimate and Art Deco’ish Avon Cinema going with an electic and exciting mix of films, big and small. (More comfortable seats  and a better sound system, however, would be appreciated.)

I think that there’s still a future for small stores with good service and a commitment to neighborhoods, especially the most attractive and walkable ones. I’m not so sure about the big physical stores, such as Macy’s. These brick-and-mortar outlets (and yes, of course they also have Web sites from which you can order) are being walloped by Amazon. Thus store traffic is way down  in many of them and these retailers respond to that by keeping fewer and fewer items in stock.

In my case, which I’m sure is common, I find that they often lack the sizes that they used they have, and as Americans become ever fatter this won’t get better. Being by American standards (but not the rest of the world’s) thin, I now must order almost all my clothes online. (That’s not much; I’m no clothes horse.)  The Web, being so huge,  has my  small size. So that’s one less customer willing to go to a real, physical store. Vicious circle and all that.