Fhar Miess is a resident of Brattleboro, chair of the Conservation Commission, a District 9 Representative Town Meeting member, and bookkeeper at Everyone's Books.
BRATTLEBORO-Dear Brattleboro Selectboard,
I'm a resident of Brattleboro, and also the numbers guy and the keeper of the financial books at Everyone's Books, off of Harmony Lot downtown.
We've been hearing a lot about how downtown merchants are hurting. From my position as the staff bookkeeper for a downtown merchant, I can confirm that pain.
Our sales for the first half of 2024 have been down by nearly 8.5% from the prior four years - and keep in mind that that counts the months of the COVID shutdown.
As the bean counter, it's my job to look at the numbers and help my boss interpret what might be causing this sales slump, and recommend a remedy.
If I were to be caught up in the current hue and cry of some other downtown merchants, I would recommend to my boss that she stop donating unsellable books to the folks who sometimes ask for change in the lot out back, because it just encourages them and makes our potential paying customers avoid our store (or so goes the prevailing wisdom).
But, as a numbers guy, I'm not so susceptible to the hue and cry.
* * *
I look at the numbers for evidence of the impact of "chaos and disorder" downtown, and, sure enough, in 2022 and 2023, we did suffer a series of break-ins.
I can't overstate the psychological impact of such a repeated violation of our space, but in economic terms, the impact was minimal. Those break-ins resulted in a loss of a little over $5,000, whereas we incurred over $400,000 in operating expenses over the same two years. It amounts to less than half of our advertising budget over that time.
Notably, the vast majority of that "lost" money went to other downtown and local businesses as we repaired the damage.
Looking at our slow sales in the first half of this year, I have a different theory.
We had a particularly bad January, with sales off 13.5% from the prior four years. June and July were also very bad, with sales down 26% and 18%, respectively. The normally slow late-winter/early-spring months were actually better than average.
My theory is that our sales were slow in January because we had an exceptionally mild winter, which sent the snow lovers farther north. And June and July were so oppressively hot and muggy, with another year of record floods, that a visit to our normally idyllic Vermont summer was not so enticing.
Sales this month, with its much more welcoming weather, have so far been keeping with the prior years' average.
I have next to no evidence for this climate change theory. It's just a feeling, egged on by my bias as a climate activist.
Which is about as much as can be said for the theory that poor and suffering people being visibly poor and suffering is hurting business downtown.
* * *
It is remarkably easy to look at people who make us uncomfortable, people who are easily deemed lower than us in the social hierarchy, and pin the blame on them for our pain, rather than to see their pain and ours as arising from the same systems of inequality and rapacious extraction, so far out of reach that they can feel as out of our control as the weather.
Perhaps some of us are ashamed to so easily cast the blame downward and instead direct it upwards to our most proximate betters: you, our beleaguered Selectboard, members, who have scarcely more control over the situation than we ourselves do.
Compared to the Elon Musks and the Jeff Bezoses and the Peter Thiels of the world, our Selectboard does have very little to do with the pain and suffering we're all enduring.
But they (you) still do have the responsibility not to make things worse, not to exacerbate all these systems of inequality, not to uselessly attempt to prevent the rest of us from falling into this poverty, homelessness, and crisis by simply "moving it along" and out of public view.
It simply won't work.
You already have a well-researched, 200-page report with evidence-based recommendations of what would work, and an ordered list of achievable priorities from our previous Town Manager.
Many of that report's recommendations may be outside of your remit, but I beg you not to push them outside of your imagination.
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