By Tom Morphet
King’s Store will close for five months starting Oct. 31, and a winter closure may become permanent, owner Bev Jones said this week.
“You know, I don’t know. I’ll see what happens this winter for me,” Jones said about the future of year-round operation.
About a year ago she put up for sale the store building, which has operated as a Main Street retail business and residence since 1903.
Jones, who has operated King’s since 1997, said the reasons she’s leaving town this winter include getting medical care and spending holidays with family, but slow sales can make the operation seem like more of a community service than a business.
And the business doesn’t make enough money for her to hire someone else to operate it while she’s away, she said.
The store offers a digital photo-processing kiosk, camera, computer and office supplies, stationery, art supplies, and volume photo-copying and printing, including posters for town events. It also does passport photos, notary services, faxing and scanning.
“I know people say my prices are high, but I don’t know how to get away from the electricity and fuel bills and the expenses that go with owning your own building and business,” Jones said.
She cited the hurdles of operating a small business, like a requirement from suppliers who set minimum purchase amounts. “If you go to reorder and they have a minimum of $200 or $300, maybe you don’t have $300 to order because you still have stock, you’re just out of one part of it.”
The cost of freight between Haines and Juneau makes it difficult for her to purchase in bulk, she said. “It’s a Catch-22, all the way down the road. If there was some way we could negotiate (a reduction in freight costs) just a few dollars per hundred pounds, it would help the small businesses.”
Costs also are added by increased regulation on some items she sells, like cans of compressed air and odorless turpentine used by artists who paint, which can no longer be shipped through the mail and must be barged.
She cited as an example some electricity “brown-outs” that blew out a screen on her photo processing machine. Because the machine is older, she had to locate a rebuilt part to fix it. The repair cost her $900 and loss of use of the machine during August, a prime summer month. “It was no fault of anybody’s, but it’s jeepers, you start thinking what you want in a store.”
Jones was apprehensive about speaking on the record and said she didn’t want to sound like a complainer. “If there isn’t a need for my type of business, I need to deal with that.” She said that there is satisfaction with running one’s own business, like the time she got to spend with her aging mother at the store.
But she said that after a few good years in the late 1990s, the business has become more like operating a fishing boat. “You make enough money to pay the bills, and if it’s a good season, you can make a little money. But if it isn’t, what are you cutting out and what are you going to do?” she said.
And she has seen a noticeable down-trend in the purchases made by cruise ship visitors, who are no longer buying for all their co-workers back home.
Winter-time departures by retirees and seasonal residents also make it harder to make it here, she said.
Haines Chamber of Commerce executive director Debra Schnabel said the challenges faced by King’s Store apply to other stores here as well. “The post office is Amazon.com’s distributor. Our location deepens the impact because consumers blend getaway excursions with shopping excursions to Juneau and Whitehorse, so the local retailers are denied the opportunity to compete on price.”
Schnabel said demographic factors are also are at play if store owners banking on selling their businesses for retirement can’t find younger buyers, or if products sold at stores are no longer relevant to the local economy.
“I think this is a very important aspect of the solution to downtown revitalization: how to reconcile what we have to what we want and need with the people who want to live here. The Chamber is vitally interested in this question,” Schnabel said.
Jones said she fears for Haines what happened to the small town in Iowa where she grew up before moving here in 1967. There, grocery stores were replaced by a single 7-Eleven.
“What are we going to do if we end up with just one grocery store and one hardware store? That means we’re really going somewhere, and the place we’re going isn’t going to be good.”
Main Street’s Babbling Book bookstore recently announced curtailed hours, but co-owner Tom Heywood said the change is only a temporary one and the store will return to regular winter hours in December.