KEEP BETTER HOURS.
I want to patronize small and local businesses. I do. But it’s kind of hard to when they’re never open. Every time I want to go to a cool, local shop or chef-owned restaurant around here, they’re closed. Every time I want to eat at the cool little New Mexican place, it’s closed and I have to go somewhere else. Today when I wanted to eat at that nice little German joint, it was closed and I ended up going to Der Wienerschnitzel.
Yesterday I told my wife that cooler weather is coming and I thought it’d be fun to walk around the antique and thrift stores in downtown Glendale and look for a nice old quilt.
Now, this is a place that spent several years and god knows how much money repaving the streets, adding pedestrian-friendly traffic control measures and crosswalks, building a new civic plaza, remodeling the library, re-landscaping, paving the sidewalks in brick, etc etc etc to attract patrons. It has also apparently been rebranded “Old Towne Glendale”, according to all the lamppost flags.
So I get there this morning, throw my son in the stroller, and start walking around. I thought it was kind of weird that we were basically the only human beings in sight until I slowly started to realize that basically the entire place is closed. It’s Sunday.
Not only are all the shops closed, but half of them don’t even have their hours posted, so who can guess when to return? Of the half that do have their hours posted, half of them (and I am not joking here), have “ish” amended onto all of their hours. As in “Monday Noonish to 5ish”. Two shops even had some smartass sign that said something like “Open as early as 7 or as late as 12 or 1, close around 5 but really whenever I feel like leaving. Lately I’ve been here at all times except when I’m somewhere else.” I realize this is probably funny to someone on the planet, but I found it annoying.
Now I understand that these people have to have lives outside of work too, and they need a day off, but why not Monday, or Wednesday? Why not be closed during the day, during the week, when everyone else is at work anyway? Why pick the day when people want to walk around and shop to close your shop in the pedestrian district? Hell, banks don’t even keep banking hours anymore. My bank is open until 7pm during the week and 10:00 to 3:00 on Saturdays.
I went down there a few times about 7 years ago and knew that all of those shops kept very limited hours (and quit going down there because of it), but I thought for sure that now that all the revitalization projects are done they would’ve changed.
If I was the city of Glendale, I’d be pissed. I’d want to know where my return on all that investment is. Why did I choke off traffic for years (very effectively driving people away) and spend millions of dollars trying to revamp a district that is essentially closed on what could be its busiest day of the week? Haven’t these shopkeepers ever heard of the church crowd? I think Glendale should say, “you want to run a shop in our district that we invested in beautifying? You’re going to be open evenings and weekends.”
Get a clue, “Main Street”. It’s not 1950.