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Thursday, May 23, 2013
Très Chic Boutique to bid adieu
by Brandon Darnell, published on April 17, 2012 at 7:05 PM
Storyline: Local Business
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Midtown’s Très Chic Boutique announced this week that it will close its doors for good after 18 years in business.
Owner Susan Tiesing, 53, said she decided to shutter the business by the end of May due to the impact of the economy as well as her need to be in Oroville to be with a family member in poor health.
“I left my shop with my worthy store manager, and I think in this tough economy you can’t expect your business to continue on without you there,” Tiesing said. “Although I think she did a good job, I wasn’t there to manage it myself.”
The shop, located at 2228 J St., specialized in prom dresses and clothing for special occasions.
Tiesing said this is the first year she has seen online sales take a large cut of her business, and though she said she heard “horror stories” from customers coming in to shop at the last minute when they were unhappy with their online orders, it made it hard for the business to run properly.
“I have to price cut to get them to stay,” she said. “I lose my profit margin, and you should never stay in business if you’re forced to cut your prices to the point where you’re selling at basically your cost just to keep them coming in.”
Despite closing the store, Tiesing said she enjoys owning the business and plans to reopen the business when the economy turns around – but likely not in Midtown.
She said the city’s removal of parking meters and switch to computerized pay boxes about three or four years ago caused many of her customers from outlying areas to stop shopping in the district.
She said she believes the city’s removal of the familiar coin-operated parking meters in favor of the new pay boxes caused confusion among some of her customers, who aren’t accustomed to using them. She added that the quick ticketing done by parking enforcement officers drove them off.
Lauren Lundsten, owner of Swanberg’s for Men: Hawaiian Shirts & More, located at 2316 J St., said he saw the same decline in business once the parking meters were uprooted.
“I bet we lost 10 percent of our business at that point,” he said. “The system chases away business.”
Lundsten said he would like to see the time limit on the street parking increased to two hours from one hour, but even that wouldn’t solve the issue.
“A lot of my customer base is seniors,” he said. “The pay boxes can be confusing, and if they get a ticket, it’s $52. I’m lucky if I can sell them a $20 shirt. A lot of them – if they get a ticket, that’s the last time they’ll shop downtown.”
In business for the past 15 years, Lundsten said he is sad to see Très Chic Boutique close.
“She’s been here for quite a while, and like me, she has a niche business,” he said. “It comes in seasons, and it’s hard to pay for those lean months when the good months aren’t very strong. I feel like I’m swimming upstream.”
Midtown Business Association Executive Director Elizabeth Studebaker said that the organization is working with the city to develop better parking options – including working out a system to have private office lots be available to the public after hours and on weekends.
“I sincerely feel it’s a negative thing for Midtown that Très Chic Boutique is closing,” Studebaker said. “They have a long history of being a well-established business here.”
As the boutique winds down its business, Tiesing said she will be putting the store’s inventory on sale starting Thursday.
“I’m choosing a time when I have a very good inventory so my sale will be full of great finds for my customers and not just odds and ends,” she said. “I’ve been down here for a long time, and I will miss it.”
Brandon Darnell is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press. Follow him on Twitter @Brandon_Darnell.
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Just a note of clarification: The business owners I talked to were upset about the coin-fed parking meters being removed in favor of the computerized pay boxes. They said they saw business decline when the parking meters were taken out, but we did not discuss whether paid parking itself is an issue for business. Perhaps there's another article in that.
The arguement for metered spaces on designated city streets is that it encourages turnover, allowing more people access to high-demand parking spaces. But turnover can be achieved by having time limits. And if those parking meters are driving away customers and decreasing the demand then what's need for them- other than to collect revenue?
Some cities have realized that a retail district can benefit without the use of on-street parking meters, that there's a direct positive correlation when potential customers aren't charged to visit a certain section of town. And many thriving cities around the world never had them to begin with. Of course, some dubious businesses like pay-parking lot operators would scream. But there is nothing in the constitution stating that every city must have metered parking. This may be a good time to consider the elimination of parking meters on certain streets as an incentive to stimulate retail growth during an economic recession.
I'd rather not have to do that, I suppose. I'd rather spend 100% of my disposable income in the central city, at businesses in my neighborhood, or as close to it as I can manage.
I suppose the example comes from places like Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles--not the super expensive end, but the funkier end that actually reminds me a lot of J Street, with a business street adjacent to residential neighborhoods. A lot of the boutiques and shops are open as late as 10 PM, because there is evening foot traffic and people visiting the neighborhood. Not every business can do that, I suppose--but many could, and could make better money doing it.
And I hope you wonderful late-night shoppers can understand that your behavior may not be typical of the customers who frequent many of the shops? And as was pointed out earlier, for some people it's not always profitable to stay open late.
About New York vs. Oklahoma City: What was Oklahoma City's transit mode share in 1935 vs. New York's in 1951? Did Oklahoma City have multiple heavy commuter rail lines and a subway?
It's not "curious" why suburbs were offering free and abundant parking while downtowns were installing parking meters--the two are directly related to the rise of public roads and highways that made the automobile, and the automobile suburb, possible in the first place. Big parking lots in the suburbs are practical because land is cheap and abundant--you're converting former farmland or wildland (or floodland, in our case), which is inexpensive, into parking lots. Land in downtowns is inherently far more expensive, because its supply is limited but its demand is high. When populations shifted to the suburbs after World War II (primarily because of massive federal subsidy) automobiles became the primary way to move back and forth. That takes a heck of a lot more space than moving people back and forth with public transit, and public transit doesn't work very well in low-density suburbs. Suddenly there's a flood of cars and nowhere to park! Even demolishing multiple city blocks often wasn't enough to solve the problem, because the city blocks are enormously expensive and the buildings on them represent huge investments that can't simply be sacrificed for parking.
Plenty of private employers downtown don't provide parking either--if you work at the Downtown Plaza mall, for instance, you are expected to buy a monthly pass to park downtown. Parking structures are expensive--on the order of $50,000 per parking space--and triples the amount of space needed for a building, since a parked car takes up more than three times the average space an office worker takes up per employee.
I'd agree that traffic management in the last 60 years has been absolutely dreadful for cities--because it is based around having people live in one part of town, work in another part, and shop in yet another part, requiring a car to get between them!
Parking meters were first installed in Oklahoma City in 1935 when it had a population of only abound 200,000. New York City didn't get their first parking meter until 1951! So I simply don't buy the line that need for parking meters correlates directly with the demand for the parking space. And I find it curious that the parking meter was being installed in the cities just around same the time the suburbs were offering tons of free and abundant parking.
Maybe I am in the minority here but I don't think traffic management in the last 60 years has been at all good for cities. Nor would I listen to the parking consultants who are paid by the manufacturers of those ridiculous kiosks and the private parking lot operators.
Are you employed by the city and therefore derive part of your income from this downtown user tax? If not I don't see how you can seriously defend them. Maybe my crusade is in vain. Maybe what people say about Sacramentans is really true.
It was a delightful little store, a pleasure even if window-shopping was the only activity that made sense for me personally. I'm sorry to see it s frilly, glittery window display go.
In the central city, land is expensive, and about 100,000 people want to park where there are only 20,000 street parking spaces. Tens of thousands of people live here, often people who prefer to live in a neighborhood where they can walk or bike to shopping areas. Tens of thousands more visit in the evenings, bringing money to spend. They are here to experience city life, something the suburbs simply don't offer, and generally they do so in the evening. If they do so during the day, people familiar with life in cities realize that paying for parking is an inescapable fact of life--it's simply a matter of supply and demand. A visitor planning on spending hundreds of dollars on dinner, drinks, theater, artwork, designer clothes or fancy furniture isn't going to blink at spending a few dollars on parking.
Midtown will never be able to out-suburb the suburbs--but we can out-urban the heck out of them! Cities offer an experience that the suburbs simply can't match--but only if the stores are open.
Again, limited supply and high demand means either a higher price or shortages. Parking meters and other forms of parking management are a sign of high parking demand, and an effort to manage that demand. In the same way, buildings tend to be taller, denser and built to lot lines in central cities because land is expensive and higher density helps manage that demand. It also makes those neighborhoods more walkable.
In all of those cities, parking is generally free in the suburbs, and outer suburban neighborhoods, but it is metered and regulated downtown. They all gripe about parking, how much it costs, and how hard it is to find a spot. But they continue going downtown, because downtown has things they want that they can't get elsewhere. That doesn't make them bumpkins--it makes them customers and visitors and friends.
Likewise it is in Sacramento--the person griping to a downtown shopkeeper about how they're never coming back downtown after this trip because of parking costs will almost certainly make the same gripe on the next trip, and the trip after that, and the trip after that, and so on.
I am sorry but the 'logic' behind the supply and demand argument (which is also not very original) is flawed. Meters are really about collecting revenue. That's why the city doesn't give a damn if it hurts some business and imposes an unequal burdensome tax on only certain citizens and sections of town. Most of the people running the show don't deal with the parking meters on a regular basis. If they did there would be any.
And I hate to break it to you but a lot of people aren't rushing to get downtown because it has things they want that they can't get elsewhere.
Those are ridiculous examples, of course--as is the idea that parking should be "free" (that is, that government should subsidize it.) You are no more entitled to "free" parking than you are to "free" food or "free" clothes. If a downtown business owner wants to open a store with a parking lot, that is their right to do so, and some do. If they don't want to provide their own parking, why should the government be forced to subsidize parking for their customers?