Main Street Niches In A Mass Sales World

Neal Peirce

PLYMOUTH, N.H.-- Steve Rand, owner-manager of the hardware store his grandfather founded in 1908, figured from the start that stopping the proposed Wal-Mart Superstore on the commercial highway outside Plymouth would be a losing battle.

"Plymouth is at a crossroads of major roads," he said. "Wal-Mart looks at a map, decides it wants its store here, not some competitor's. That's how they dominate. We're just one move on their huge chessboard. But stop them? They're too large a Goliath for this David."

Only a regional impact economic study, Rand figured, could have tripped the Wal-Mart project. But New Hampshire, like most states, leaves every town to fend for itself. Even if Plymouth had turned Wal-Mart down, neighboring towns would likely have welcomed the store and its tax base.

So now Wal-Mart has arrived and Steve Rand is closing an outlying branch he'd had for nearly 33 years near the Wal-Mart site -- one of the thousands of small-town retail outlets extinguished by the Goliath from Bentonville.

Still, walking around downtown Plymouth with Steve Rand -- he won't even bother with a coat on a winter day -- you discover he has a survival strategy rolling.

His own downtown store, Rand explains, is solidly profitable. It sells specialized hardware and paint items acquired at attractive prices through a cooperative. It's staffed by employees with extensive knowledge of customer needs. To meet the new competition, the store is now open seven days a week.

We pause at Plymouth's handsome brick post office, facing directly onto the picturesque town common. It has a plaque commemorating its dedication in 1936, when James A. Farley was postmaster general. But in the mid-1990s, U.S. Postal Service bureaucrats decided they'd like to move operations out of town to a one-story, one-stop facility, convenient for trucks.

Rand and his friends hit the panic button, contacting everyone they knew in the political world, and got the decision reversed.

They did the same when a local selectman suggested moving Plymouth's town offices to a single-story building with lots of parking, far from Main Street. Rand and allies argued hard to renovate the historic courthouse building, also facing the town common, for town offices. They prevailed. Instead of becoming a pile of bricks, the courthouse underwent a handsome redesign. We chat with one of the clerks; it's clear she takes immense pride in working there.

Plymouth, it should be noted, isn't just any old town -- it is home to thriving Plymouth State University and its cultural arts center, where the New Hampshire Symphony plays and many theatrical performances are launched each year.

Still, a number of Main Street stores have struggled. Rand explains the history of each, how ugly post-World War II facades are being replaced and strategies developed to fill gaps. It's no surprise to discover this is one of New Hampshire's 19 officially designated Main Streets, with a full-time director and well-developed strategy. (Nationally there are about 1,600, reports the National Trust for Historic Preservation, founder of the program.)

Flower barrels on Main Street, a jazz series on the common, a Halloween festival, a welcome day for college students and their families, merchants' forums, a downtown cleanup day -- all are results of Plymouth's Main Street program, now five years old.

I ask Rand who the principal supporters are and he replies, to my surprise, that they're not predominantly merchants -- retailers are often "the last to see the forest for the trees." Instead, Main Street's most prominent rooters are regional institutions -- the local hospital, the university, a private school. The hospital and university, for example, have recruiting issues: their prospects of attracting a physician or professor are enhanced, notes Rand, when "downtown is a community -- not a black hole."

Put another way, Main Streets, like big city downtowns, are calling cards to the world, often important for a whole ring of communities. They're the antithesis of the big box retail store -- constructed one month, open the next, easily vacant a few seasons later as the market shifts.

Successful Main Street programs, Rand notes, take years to mature -- four or five years to change attitudes and build initial confidence, five to 10 or more years for owners to start reinvesting seriously, 15 or 20 for the full recovery and new growth to take solid root.

Such patience sounds a world away from the globalized world of the big chains -- Wal-Mart, for instance, with its expectation of opening hundreds of stores, hiring 160,000 more employees worldwide just this year.

And virtually no one foresees a time when Americans' big-time retailing will focus again on Main Streets.

Yet as Plymouth shows, town history matters. And there can be a very real niche for community-based, smaller specialized stores, the places we know and are known when we go in. The rewards, for towns that care enough to nurture and patronize their own, can be immense.

Neal Peirce's e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.