The recession is beginning to hit local business hard. 3 Gatos in Hillsborough is going out of business and Mehera Shaw here in Carrboro is holding a liquidation sale. I also hear through the grapevine that two new-ish restaurants are struggling, one of them a month away from having to shutter the operation. This is what some folks were talking about when they said it was Main Street that needed to be bailed out. Both streets (the other being Wall) needed help. Without helping the big banks, commercial credit would be even more squeezed than it is right now. But there needed, and still needs to be, some specific policy and moolah earmarked for small businesses like these.
I don't know if you've ever owned a business, particularly one that involves inventory. I grew up in a family business (some of you old timers may remember Chefs International in Kroger Plaza). I know from watching my father how hard it is to keep a small business going during tough economic times. And Chefs was considered a success. Still, we closed the store in 1979 after 15 years because the cost of doing business was high and competition from deep-pocketed behemoths pulled away some of our customer base. So when a locally owned and operated business closes, it's kind of visceral for me.
But it's not all doom and gloom in the local economy, at least not if you believe the folks at the Visitors Center who're crowing about the hotel boom coming to Orange County. You can read about it in a detailed story by Rich Fowler in this week's Carrboro Citizen:
Huge increase in hotel rooms on the horizon.
Is this what the Reverend Mother meant in The Sound of Music when she tells Maria, "When the Lord closes a door, somewhere he opens a window"?
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