Do downtown promotions = dollars downtown?
Art Walk in Hillsborough, NC
Smallwander.com is hosting it’s monthly teleconference this upcoming Monday, Nov 24, from 10 to 11 am. The topic is “Do downtown promotions = dollars downtown?
I particularly would like to explore why Hillsborough NC’s recent “Ladies Night Out” promotion was successful. On a rainy Thursday night, hordes of women descended on the town and bought like crazy in the shops. If you have similar stories about how special events translate to dollars in the shops, please think about them beforehand and share them with us.
Panelists will include Amy Wilmoth, a freelance marketing consultant for small businesses in the Triangle area of North Carolina, Elizabeth Read, Executive Director of the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, Eddie Ide, President of Newton Merchants, Inc. of Newton North Carolina, and Greta Lint, tourism consultant.
We will be inviting town representatives in our smallwander network. People will be able to either call in via telephone or listen in over the web. They can also type questions to us.
Buy local podcast
Leon Tongret and Greta Lint discuss how buying locally helps small towns.
Why smaller is sometimes better
From Blogging Stocks
When the big company leaves the small town
This post opens our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered. Watch for more Big Company, Small Town posts coming soon.
All across this great country of ours, small cities, towns, and villages have been built in the shadows of major companies that supply work for their local populations. It can be a wonderful situation that cultivates a special kind of community and a deep-seated local pride. However, it can also be a recipe for civic disaster, if the major supplier of a wage base in a locality goes out of business or leaves town. Such was the near disastrous fate of Park Falls, Wisconsin, not so long ago.
The city of Park Falls, which is Wisconsin’s most geographically isolated city, was built around its paper mill. At its height, the mill helped to bring the population of the city to nearly 4,000 inhabitants. However, in 2006 the paper mill, which was operating at reduced capacity under ownership from out of state, was shut down almost without any prior notice. The result was immediate and deeply wrenching turmoil. Not only had the paper mill workers lost an excellent source of income, but the collateral damage was jarringly significant also. Loggers had no local market for their pulp wood. Dozens of family-feeding log trucks were idled. Private contractors who did various types of work for the mill were left with thousands of dollars worth of unpaid invoices. Local vendors, retailers, and support businesses almost immediately went slack.
Travel to Main Street to shop–by train
Here is an interesting post from teaberries in All the Little Stuff That is Life.
“What I’m saying, is 1) bring back Main Street shopping, only maybe this time, we need to base it on more European models of villages and towns. 2) It’s time for the big-box retailers to break themselves down, and start fitting into the mold of small town America. Then 3) reform transportation, start using trains again. This country has thousands of small towns, and hundreds of miles of railroad tracks connecting them. Use them, again. Refer, again, to Europe and Japan.”