As downtown holiday lights are ready to go up, a new “DarkStorefrontsMA” presence on the Internet is giving new meaning to “Black Friday.”
The “#DarkStoreFrontsMA” hashtag on Instagram and Twitter, with a “darkstorefrontspreview.squarespace.com” web presence, is one of the “darker messages” from the 4,000-member Retailers Association of Massachusetts to a Franklin County Chamber of Commerce breakfast gathering Friday.
RAM President Jon B. Hurst, while displaying statistics that show the state’s retailers holding their own, pointed to headwinds that traditional brick and mortar stores must contend with.
He said the “darkstore” campaign, which features images of closed stores, was a way to make legislators and the public aware of the need to support local retail businesses.
The latest blow against downtown retailers, warned Hurst, is the state’s new marijuana law, which he contends could make downtowns less family-friendly and attractive to shoppers as pot stores proliferate.
“It may be very, very damaging,” said Hurst, whose 98-year-old trade association opposed the November ballot question allowing marijuana sales without giving towns an easy way to impose restrictions.
“A developer can impose a no-smoking policy in a mall area,” but “there’s no control on a Main Street,” even though Question 4 bans smoking pot in public places, he said. “Downtowns already have enough challenges,” he said.
Posing even more competition than shopping malls, though, are online retailers, Hurst told the roughly 80 Chamber members.
“Customers don’t have to be here,” he said. “They can be anywhere around the world without ever leaving the couch. Mobile commerce changed everything. Mobile commerce was up last year by 20 percent. Internet sales are roughly 10 percent of all sales.”
Eighteen percent of all holiday season sales this year are projected to be done online, said Hurst, who added that local retailers are taken for granted by legislators, town officials and many people who otherwise are invested in the community.
That was the idea behind RAM’s DarkStoreFrontMA “Once Main Street Leaves, It’s Not Coming Back” campaign, which Hurst said was born out of retailers’ frustration and anger over the state Legislature’s not offering a sales tax holiday this past August, which cost retailers a 42 percent drop in sales from the same period last year.
RAM members were also angry that the state also granted Amazon’s new Fall River distribution center an exemption from the state’s blue laws, which require other retailers to pay employees time and a half for Sunday.
RAM also promotes a more positive “#BuyinMA” campaign to support retail sales that account for nearly 13.5 percent of the economy, Hust said. He tells lawmakers, “You own this by certain high costs and discrimination under the law,” including the absence of state sales tax for online retailers, “giving the majority of Internet sellers a 6.5 percent head start. … Why should they operate under a different rules than our stores?”
Hurst urged the formation of a Main Street program within state government, which he said could help coordinate ideas from different communities, and from across the nation through the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s National Main Street Center.
RAM is predicting a 3.9 growth in holiday retail sales this year, compared with a 4.7 percent increase last year, and contrasted with a 3.6 percent increase nationally this year.
“We want to express to our consumers the importance of investing back in the economy,” he said. “The question is, where are they going to make that investment. They can choose to spend it here, locally, or they can choose to spend it in Seattle, or frankly, in China. That’s the question … whose economy is going to benefit out of it?”
After Hurst’s talk, Tamara Beauregard, vice president of Wilson’s department store in Greenfield said she appreciated his description of “the huge obstacles that we have in retailing,” including the state’s Blue Law requirement that requires time-and-half pay for holidays.
Because Christmas falls on a Sunday, for example, state law requires that stores close on Monday as the holiday and offer overtime pay for employees. The malls plan to open on Monday, she found. “Massachusetts and Rhode Island are the only states where you have to be closed on Monday” as a holiday. “It’s horrible.”
Greenfield Business Association Coordinator Caitlin von Schmidt said Hurst’s talk echoes pretty much what she hears from merchants in town.
In addition to trying to distinguish themselves from online retailers and deal with “absentee landlords who’d rather take the tax loss and not rent (empty) space, von Schmidt said, “When the courthouse left, that was a big blow. I’ve have heard from a couple people who are concerned that people may have changed their buying habits and won’t come back. From a retailers’ standpoint, everyone’s on the edge because so many people depend on the holiday season. If people don’t shop local, that’s an issue. Everyone was hoping the courthouse would be open right now, but that influx everyone was hoping for is not going to be happening.”
The county courthouse, which has undergone a three-year expansion, is slated to reopen on Main Street early next year.
With that in mind, the GBA is planning its Dec. 2 promotional Jinglefest as a way “to pull people downtown so they can see everything that’s going on.”
Von Schmidt called the state’s Blue Laws “so outdated and absurd, and they disproportionally harm local retail, and added that empty storefronts are “a chicken-and-egg thing, because the more good businesses you have downtown, the more people are going to come to shop at the businesses that have been around for a while. So it behooves everyone to get those spaces filled with businesses you feel are going to hang around for a while. My personal opinion is that what downtown Greenfield offers right now, it’s doing really well.”