Positively 8th Street

When I moved to NYC, many moons ago, shoe shopping meant a trip to 8th street -- and further into the East Village and Lower East Side.

8th Street was a tatty warren of small retail spaces, with a large complement of shoe stores all over the high-low spectrum of price and taste. I assume that most of these small businesses were family owned and operated. One indelible memory, probably circa 1990, was an improbable and extremely uncomfortable foray out with a guy -- while we were in the actual process of breaking up. I remember that he really wanted some Bally loafers that were a bit out of his reach.

I broke up with 8th Street as a shoe mecca quite some time ago. I think that the world of buying shoes has been changed by so many factors: the internet, Ebay, suburban malls that seem to contain 30 shoe stores, giant warehouse stores that advertise 40,000 pairs of shoes in stock...

Today's New York Times offers a real estate view of 8th Street's changing dynamics. As the shoe stores have closed, the landlords are seeking businesses with better cash flow to replace them. It appears that the landlords may be courting fast food restaurants to appeal to the local NYU students.

No villains here: many small firms simply fail to reinvent themselves in response to new externalities.

And not every small business closure is a business failure; business owners retire, decide to change careers, pick up and move to another town. I have a reference on this somewhere, which I'll find and post.

(And apologies, but Blogger doesn't seem optimized for the Mac browsers used by the family members I'm visiting...so I'll fix links and things down the road a bit!)