A tardy proposal for downtown retail
by Jack Neely
It has become a monotonous theme over the last 20 years or so. One after another old-line retail store closes downtown. Each time they say the main problem is parking.
Some of them were decades-old retail establishments run by good-hearted people, credits to downtown, and to Knoxville. When they said their problem was parking, we tended to believe them.
I know nothing about retail. I once tried, and failed, to learn the ways of a cash register. But there's something that's been a puzzle to me. Most of the old-line businesses that have quit downtown over the last 20 years, citing parking concerns, were places that were open only Monday through Friday, roughly nine to five.
In other words, these businesses chose to open strictly during those hours of the week when parking downtown is toughest.
Maybe I'm blurting out what's supposed to be a municipal secret, but parking downtown is often a breeze. It's not hard on weekday evenings. It's even easier on weekends. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, I can usually park like Batman, right in front of my building in the center of the CBID, no charge.
What's especially strange is that the times that it's easiest to park downtown are the times that shopping is busiest elsewhere in the city, especially along the fabled commercial Mecca Kingston Pike. For suburban stores, Saturday and Sunday afternoons are prime business time. The malls are often jammed. According to a recent study published in American Demographics, people today are much more likely to shop on weekends, especially on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, than on weekdays.
But at those times, when it's so easy to park downtown—and as business is booming elsewhere in town—most of downtown's stores over the last 20 years or so have been closed and locked tight. That has been the traditional way of the downtown merchant.
Maybe there is, or was, some kind of reasoning behind it. If parking is hard to come by, Monday through Friday, nine to five, it's because there are more than 16,000 cars parked there already. You'd think all those folks could support some retail on their own.
But maybe we downtown office workers aren't as useful to retailers as we used to be. A generation or two ago, office workers habitually spent their lunch breaks walking around, sometimes doing some shopping.
Some still do. But one recent bit of data suggests that nationwide, two-thirds of office workers now eat lunch at their desks. Maybe e-mail and the web are keeping more people inside, entertained at their desks during breaks. They do their strolling, and some of their shopping, with their fingers.
A bigger reason commuters don't get out as much may be that, for them, parking is all too convenient. Unlike commuters in many cities, and unlike Knoxville in the boom years of downtown retail, Knoxville commuters today often park adjacent to their workplaces, often inside or underneath their buildings. In a typical day, a downtown worker might not walk by any store at all.
Meanwhile, for the last 30 or 40 years, general shopping habits have been shifting. Once, shoppers—who were, for the most part, housewives—did the greatest part of their shopping in the daytime, during regular business hours. It worked for everybody. Women were freest to shop then, before they had to start cooking supper for their husbands and kids. That schedule worked well for the retailers, too, who liked being able to get home in time to watch Huntley and Brinkley on TV, and to eat the suppers their wives cooked.
However, as more women joined the work force, shopping became more of a nights-and-weekends activity. West Knoxville changed to suit the new habits, but most downtown retailers didn't.
A few adjusted. Earth To Old City, perhaps downtown's most successful retailer lately, has a lot of things going for it, but one of those things is expanded hours. They're not open first thing in the morning, but they're open in the evenings and on weekends. They tell me they do most of their weekly business in the weekends and evenings—times other than the traditional 40-hour workweek.
Thanks to new residents, more events, longer restaurant hours, and more evening and weekend attractions—downtown after 6, and on weekends, seems livelier than it was 20 or even 30 years ago. I knew something had changed when one Saturday afternoon this fall my 13-year-old daughter, the most prodigious shopper in my family and a devout mall devotee, begged me to take her and a friend downtown. As it turned out, they had a swell time, drinking Italian sodas in the Old City and shopping at the several trendy new boutiques on Market Square. She wanted to come back again two weekends later.
Anyway, I began writing this column over a year ago, in hope of encouraging downtown's strong-willed bankers' hours retailers to try something different. But I waited too long. There are hardly any of them left.
November 20, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 47
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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