Ojai For The Holidays
By Bill Buchanan
It seems a little strange to be writing a column about Christmas. The temperature was over 90 degrees just a couple of weeks ago.
But still, today is “Black Friday”; the official or at least “unofficial” start of the Christmas shopping season. I’m not sure when today became designated the start of the shopping season. I always wonder just who gets to decide these things. Is it a secret committee, or is it just this one guy who comes out and says, “Ahh, I think today should be the start of the Christmas shopping season”— kind of like if the groundhog comes out of his hole and sees his shadow, it means six more weeks of winter. I never understood that one either. And I still can’t figure out how to tell when Easter falls each year.
At any rate, the season is upon us. And I would encourage each of you to do something —- give some serious thought to shopping with local merchants first. If you can’t find what you want or need, fine. Go somewhere else. But please give it a real try first.
Why? This is a great town. Many reading this column were not born and raised here. You came here from someplace else. You came here because you saw what a wonderful town Ojai is, and you said, “Why don’t we move here?” A lot of why this town is so special is due to the people who run some of our local businesses. They are your neighbors. They are your friends. They are the people who contribute time, money, goods and services to many of the nonprofit service organizations in this town. They are the ones who donate to locate programs. They are the ones who buy advertising banners for the high school football team. They are the ones who join the civic clubs like Rotary and put on projects that raise money for good works in the community. They are the people like the Ojai Valley Inn who hold fundraisers to benefit local charities like Help of Ojai, allowing them to do so much for the less fortunate in our community. Go to any fundraiser, charity event, or town-wide celebration like Ojai Day, and there will be scores of local business people who make it all possible.
That is one reason to shop locally. Another is that we have great stores here. There is always a tendency to downplay or even denigrate something that is local. The same merchandise in a store 50 miles away somehow seems more appealing or exotic. Maybe is the (false) sense of status associated with saying, “Oh yes, I got that in Santa Barbara” or “I found this in a cute little store in L.A.”
Well, we have lots of cute little shops here. People come here from all over to shop our unique stores. My wife proved this theory when she was in town a few weeks ago as she tore through Julia Rose & Co. like Sherman went through Atlanta during the Civil War.
I have heard all the comments in other towns about “Oh, their prices are too high” or “Oh, they don’t have what I want.” To that I would say, when was the last time you were actually in the store to see what they have and what their prices are? Don’t they deserve a look before you go elsewhere?
Ojai has wisely enacted a “no chain store” ordinance to keep this town from becoming a strip center on one end of town and a strip center on the other end of town with little or nothing in-between. That is a good start. But local shopper patronage is also an important component.
In the mid-’80s, I ran a newspaper in south Louisiana in a city about the size of Ojai. It was not nearly as nice a town, but the population was about the same. The city was an hour from New Orleans, and there was a mall in Baton Rouge about 30 minutes up the road, both of which took some customers from local merchants. The town had a family department and hardware store that started up in the 1830s, and celebrated its 150th anniversary while I was publisher there. The store had survived the Civil War, the Great Depression, World War II, the ‘60s, Vietnam and God knows what else. Wal-Mart moved into town, and this family-owned local store was gone within five years.
When the town was so devastated that it was featured on “Sixty Minutes” as a chain store victim, Wal-Mart abandoned their 40,000-or-so-square-foot building, leaving a gaping hole in the community. Then they invited everyone to come see them in their new “super store” across the river 15 miles away. So the city lost the sales taxes revenue as well.
If I was back in that town now, I would want to ask all those people who abandoned their local merchants one question: “Was it worth allowing your town to be ravaged in order for you to say you bought something in Baton Rouge, or to save 10 cents a roll on paper towels?”
Please remember Ojai for the holidays.
If you see Ojai business people shopping at Cost-Co, Smart and Final or at the 99 cent store, don’t worry about them, they are just going to up the cost and re-sell these items to the locals who think that by shopping in town they are saving another “local” merchant. Avoid the middle man and shop at the discount stores yourself. Since Ojai has become a tourist trap, and merchants want locals to shop at their stores, have two prices, one for locals and one that is higher for tourists.
Thanks for the link. I never before knew that these results were publicly available, and don’t remember ever having seen an article or editorial based on the distilled data gathered from this survey. I will read all of them.
Getting people to shop Ojai will take effort on the part of both customers and merchants. It is and always will be a two-way street. There is no historical lesson that can change this fact, nor is there any amount of chiding or guilt-giving or even outright browbeating (a tactic of which the editorialist is not guilty) that will cause people to change their shopping habits if they really can’t feel good, for one reason or another, about patronizing Ojai businesses. Even with better support from every shopper in town, nobody will ever willingly spend all of their money here unless they simply cannot get out of town to shop.
By the way, I see Ojai business people at CostCo, Smart & Final, and even at The 99 Cent Store, and these would apparently be the people who should most agree with the sentiment of your editorial. (Perhaps if we spent more money at their stores, they would not be required to shop at Ventura and Oxnard discount stores. Or, perhaps they — like the rest of us — have what they feel to be perfectly valid and defensible reasons for shopping where they shop.)
Whatever the answer turns out to be, it will require commitments made on both the part of the shoppers and the merchants.
I agree with the sentiment of this editorial, and I do shop in Ojai. However, I do not shop here because I feel compelled to shop here, nor can anyone compel me to shop here with their imploring words or by any kind of decree.
When I don’t shop here, why is that? The reason is this: I don’t feel welcomed. I do not feel as if the merchants in question value my business. I don’t feel that they care whether or not I actually do shop in Ojai, or at their place of business.
Am I a difficult customer? To the contrary; I have never returned an item purchased from any store in Ojai. I wait my turn patiently. I do not ask for what I cannot have. I do not haggle, and I do not complain. I do not tell them what something costs elsewhere. I have been in business, and I know what can and cannot be done. I do not expect merchants to jump through hoops or kiss my ring.
What I do expect, however, is for the counter help to look me in the eye at least once during a transaction instead of continuing to have a private and personal phone conversation while all but ignoring my presence, except for the moment when they smash an uncounted wad of change into my hand and turn away to get back to their real business; that phone call.
This too-busy-to-pay-attention-to-the-customer behavior is not just the exception anymore; it has become routine.
I also expect that if I stand in line for almost 10 minutes, that if the phone rings the clerk will not allow the person on the phone to essentially cut in line in front of me. I expect the clerk to say something like, “Excuse me, I’m really swamped right now. I can either put you on hold, or you can call back in a few minutes.” I’m standing there in line with cash and merchandise in hand. I am the proverbial bird in the hand, not the bird in the bush who is just asking whether or not an item is in stock, or shopping around for the best price. I am the person who actually bothered to come into that store, and I don’t feel that I should have to watch the clerk disappear from behind the counter, walk into the store, and hunt down an item for someone who has simply called in a query. Am I being unreasonable?
I also do not wish to have to listen to the long litany of a store owner’s personal beliefs before I am allowed to make my purchase and leave. If you want to tell me about your political beliefs; your religious beliefs; your hatreds, and your conspiracy theories, then please don’t hold me hostage while you do it. Don’t stand there waving my credit card or cash around, talking on and on and on without completing my sale. If, however, this is how you intend to behave every single time I or anyone else walks into your store, please post some kind of warning and on that warning sign give us a safe word; a word that we can use to stop you from endlessly ramming your beliefs down the throats of your customers without requiring said customers to be unarguably assertive in order to stop you. At the very least, learn to recognize the difference between a willing participant and someone who feels victimized by you. Shopping at your store should not require me to have to stand up for myself every time I stand at your counter. If you’re that lonely, then close down for 30 minutes and we can go have coffee together and you can tell me what’s on your mind in a much more conducive environment.
I could go on, but this should be enough to get across my main gripes. (Although I suppose that I could talk about market clerks who carry out long and involved conversations with the previous customer who has finished their business at the counter, while all of the rest of us are forced to either wait it out or get into another line, if there actually is another line. You wouldn’t do that if the manager was standing there, and you know it.)
A former nominal head of the OVN once ran a survey, and he asked people to tell him why they did or did not shop in Ojai. I gladly took that survey, but nothing ever came of it. The results were never published. I don’t even know if any merchants were made privy to the results of this survey. Perhaps it’s time to run that survey again, if you’re really serious about getting people to shop in Ojai. This time, do something reasonable with the results; share them with everyone.
If the merchants, the publisher, or any of the other readers read this and decide to say that I have unreasonable expectations, and that if I don’t like the program here in Ojai I can just take my business elsewhere, let me tell you that I agree with you wholeheartedly. I can and will take my business elsewhere if you make me feel unwelcome or as if I have annoyed you by simply walking into your place of business. If I’m the only one who feels the way I do, I will not be missed, and this will probably be a happier town for everyone else when I quit shopping here. However, am I actually the only one who feels this way, and am I the only one who will be taking their business down the hill?
I might not get treated any better in Ventura or Oxnard, but at least in those towns full of strangers I don’t expect to get treated any better. In this village, I do.
ADMiN NOTE: Click to read the survey to which this post refers. The question was “Tell Ojai merchants why you shop here, why you don’t”