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I own a reasonably well performing indie bookstore. I've noticed for the model to work you need a critical mass of other local shops clustered to make the trip

I own a reasonably well performing indie bookstore. I've noticed for the model to work you need a critical mass of other local shops clustered to make the trip an experience for families and diverse tastes. My working theory is that three of such small businesses are sufficient and could operate well with a common inventory strategy and manager (e.g. a bookstore, a toy store, and a tea or candy shop...nothing that spoils in the very short term). When I've got a bit more time I want to try that idea and see if it works as a way to revitalize otherwise charming old downtown areas with vacant retail space and communities wishing to bring back their main street. Giving this idea away in case anyone else has tried or wants to try sooner than me and report back.

hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago
I have seen bookstore (second-handed books) thriving near universities. Your idea is actually very interesting and remind me of the mall model -- the mall model worked because everyone in the family gets his/her own share of pleasure. Of course the traffic matters a lot, too. Hope you start that experiment soon and succeed!
- ghaff 5mo ago
  The general theory of most malls was that you had anchor stores. My local one has a couple of stores adjacent to the mall (a local chain supermarket and and Home Depot) that are very busy, almost too much so. The mall itself is pretty much dead and has been on the market for ages. The anchor stores--JCPenney, Sears, and Macy's are all long gone. Haven't been in the actual mall in ages but I assume it's pretty sad and there seem very few cars in the lots. Oh, yeah, the Toys 'R Us in the complex is long gone too.
  - hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago
    It's pretty much the same in my place, too. The old malls are dying. There are new malls coming up, but I'm not sure how they are going to hold in the future.
    - ghaff 4mo ago
      Luxury malls in cities aren't really my thing and there are even some higher-end suburban malls where Apple stores seem to have become an anchor store in this day and age that I would have laughed at once upon a time--shows how much I know. I will say I have walked into some malls in Vegas and only half-hyperbolically thought I couldn't (and/or wouldn't want) to have afforded pretty much anything.
      - hnthrowaway0315 4mo ago
        I'm not into them either. I'm more into second-handed bookstores where I might get some pleasant surprises once for a while.
- TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
  Universities are effectively ultra-anchors. You have large numbers of students from mostly middle class backgrounds, many of whom have free time and disposable income. (Or at least they're not worried about their loans yet.) And then you have the academics. Tenured profs are relatively well paid. Adjuncts/assistants not so much, but they still like nice things. The UK's public school towns (Marlborough, Harrow, Winchester...) often have a prosperous independent store economy on a smaller scale, for the same reasons. Clusters work well in these towns. If you try them elsewhere, like one of the UK's many run-down towns, they're more likely to fail because the prosperity just isn't there.
ricardonunez 5mo ago
I always wanted to open an indie book store + coffee shop and had a similar analysis. I read recently they are having a come back. Barnes and noble is opening in my city after a decade ago books a million closed and our local indie closed during Covid.
deleted 5mo ago
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bombcar 5mo ago
The thing I've noticed is that even dying downtowns want insane amounts of rent; I think you have to be able to buy the building to make it work. However, that's not as unrealistic as it may seem, because the city itself often owns a decent amount of downtown, and can make a deal.
- expedition32 4mo ago
  For the companies that own all that real estate it's better to let them sit empty for years than lower the rent. But eventually the hammer always falls.
- vasco 5mo ago
  If the only way to be successful is to start by buying multiple downtown locations outright I think we know why the downtown is empty. Nobody is going to do that to open a shop. Not even the mega chains are usually buying anything.
  - colechristensen 5mo ago
    The path to the return of main street is bullying your city council to attach ridiculous property tax penalties for any vacancies for whatever the central business district commercial zone is and not allow land zoned in that fashion to change. Force the rents and property values down until a competitive market rate is arrived at naturally. Punish the greed that attempts to store or preserve value by leaving things vacant for years.
    - gizajob 5mo ago
      You’re right but it seems like the exact opposite scenario is usually in effect. Particularly in the UK, landlords seem stuck in some kind of bizarre logic of “oh, nobody can rent my building, it just has to sit here being worth nothing” and “oh, you want my worthless building, then naturally I’ll need ALL your profit and more.”
      - 5mo ago
twunde 5mo ago
I can't comment about the minimum number of stores, but I do think its the correct idea. I live in a town of ~12000. We have 6.5 bookstores (including the good local thrift store as .5). Stores/restaurants do turn over fairly regularly, so its still tough, but it certainly seems viable. We get a good number of tourists, which helps but I do think you need a mix of restaurants, and a mix of different types of stores. Even as you go to nearby towns with big box stores, they all have downtowns that are doing ok with locally run businesses. Notably the downtowns all are small business focused with few if any box stores
wodenokoto 5mo ago
Tsutaya, a Japanese dvd rental store has a specialty shop in Hiroshima. It’s best described as a library hosting a small electronics store, a clothing store, a stationery shop and a coffee shop.
The_Blade 5mo ago
(In slight contrast to my other comment) I think Larimer Square in Denver is trying to do something akin. There was a land-edge-lord kerfuffle and gone are staples like The Market and Ted’s Montana Grill (RIP, I was also just in Bozeman). rn one side is bookstore - jewelry & artsy - African jewelry & artsy - Rioja (Denver famous food) - John Fluevog (Vancouver shoes) - Osteria Marco (Denver less famous Italian) - Van Leewuen (NYC ice cream). I hope it all works... now, bookstores here are a whole other mess. two words, Tattered Cover. there are ample used bookstores, though, i found a copy of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals for $6.50 on Colfax that should probably be handled with BSL-3 precaution which is as it should be
ahartmetz 5mo ago
I know someone who used to manage department stores (one branch at a time, several locations). He talked about clusters in a very similar way: Stores need nearby other stores to be attractive.
ncallaway 5mo ago
I take my two little ones almost weekly to our small downtown area. The trip is usually a coffee shop, the bookstore, and a rotating third one (sometimes a candy shop sometimes the toy store, sometimes something else). Anyway, we're an N=1 confirmation of that theory.
- a1o 5mo ago
  In our case the coffee shop is in the bookstore and it is located right in front of the third. The third is a really nice park (think lake and lots of playgrounds plus activities).
me_smith 5mo ago
This is a timely comment for me. I have been doing research on opening a small indie (new/used) bookstore in a small old downtown I walk through almost every day. It has restaurants, specialty shops, coffee shops and a small local grocery store. I've always thought it was missing a bookstore. Any tips/warnings that might not be immediately obvious to a hopeful bookstore owner? Do you think there is a sweet spot in terms of square footage of retail space? Margins are low so do you supplement with sidelines/events/memberships? One of my next steps is to join the ABA as a provisional member to get access to their new bookseller guides.
- mattbrewsbytes 5mo ago
  I'm just an internet commenter who knows nothing about running a retail store and has thought about a bookstore as well. With that out of the way, finding high margin items to sell to offset low margin items would make sense. I think this is why you see coffee paired with bookstores, coffee should be high margin but might also require food licensing/inspections. Ideas for a local bookstore: seasonal and local items for sale, think gift giving timeframes - mothers day, fathers day, end of year holidays. Items like unique greeting cards, calendars, custom gift wrapping, having a kids section with higher margin items kids like - toys, trading cards, etc. Also you could throw some checkout friendly things like book lights, book marks, candies, etc. If you find local craftspeople, offer some shelf/floor space for free if you can agree on a split of the margin. Hand-crafted things would pair well during holiday seasons and advertised properly might get repeat visits and word of mouth spreading.
  - me_smith 5mo ago
    Thanks for the comment and ideas. I was thinking through the different types of things that could be sidelines. You hit on many of them. There are some cultural festivals that occur in the downtown that can bring opportunities for some local craftspeople to share retail space before and after the festivals. Also, some branded items that go well with books like totes and bookmarks.
  - pstuart 5mo ago
    And if there was space for it, hosting board/card games.
jmyeet 5mo ago
So there are a few versions of this. The most common in the US is the strip mall. This is a largely American, soulless construct of commercial space with parking out front, typically on a major road. There are lots of reasons why this flourished in the US. It's a symptom of society being so car-dependent, which is by design. Rents here are typically lower than other options so some businesses can survive in strip malls that can't elsewhere. The next step up (density-wise) are actual malls, or shopping centers for the non-Americans. There are different versions of this. You have the entirely indoor mall. You also have other anchor stores that pop up nearby (eg Home Depot) that are popular but can't justify the mall rent costs. Often a bunch of other businesses will sprout around these stores, which is why they're called anchor stores. Anchor stores are also things you generally need in a mall to bring in enough traffic to make the whole thing economical eg supermarkets, department stores. Malls in general have been dying in droves. Basically too many got built in the 1970s through 1990s and online shopping is killing them. There are photography and video channels dedicated to exploring dead malls. The third rarest option is the walkable district. This is generally the downtown of cities that existed before cars. People generally love these but public transit is an issue. Americans always want to drive even when there are viable options otherwise. That means having to build parking garages and the whole thing kinda falls apart. Or at least it losses some of its charm. The hellish end of this spectrum is Houston. Some cities have managed to rejuvenate such areas by diverting traffic and generally investing in the area. But what tends to always happen is that businesses will rejuvenate an area and then the landlords will kill it by charging exorbitant rents. I've seen 40+ year old restaurants close because of rent hikes in areas that only really existed for that restaurant. This is part of the problem with housing being so expensive. It makes everything expensive. That local shops? Well it costs as much to build as a house and a house is easier to sell. But a cafe or a bakery or a bookstore or some other eclectic shop can survive when the rent is $20,000/year. You don't need to pay staff as much when houses cost $100k not $1M. Expensive housing just strangles everything. But when that rent goes to $200,000 over a decade well then suddenly only chain stores and big box retail can survive there so what was once a charming downtown turns into Chili's, a CVS and a Chase bank. So this can go wrong even in dense places like NYC. There's a real issue right now with so-called "zombie leases". Basically, companies like CVS, Duane Reade and Walgreens signed high-rent long-term leases but then decided to close the store. The store remains empty because the owner has no incentive to rent it for a now-lower market rent while the billion dollar company is still on the hook for it. Enough of these and a street can look abandoned. I really think that when cities choose to rejuvenate an area they should acquire all of it first. Eminent domain, baby. I saw a Tiktok awhile ago where someone posited that things we once took for granted get taken away from us and sold back to us. The specific example was walkable cities. That used to be the norm. Now it's a luxury. We can't have that. If people walk everywhere and take a train or bus well then they might not buy a car. Then they'r enot buying insurance and gas and maintaining it. Unacceptable. Society really is getting dystopian.
vonnik 5mo ago
This strategy has worked well for both Shakespeare and Co. in Paris and Shakespeare and Sons in Berlin. Books + Bakery + Coffee. Both of course are set in living pedestrian cities. https://www.shakespeareandsons.com https://www.shakespeareandsons.com
- golem14 5mo ago
  It has not worked for Borders in Palo Alto. But that was a chain, maybe other locations forced closured everywhere, and that Borders could have survived. I doubt it, however.
- kergonath 5mo ago
  I can’t comment on the shop in Berlin, but the one in Paris is a special case. It’s in a relatively central location in a 11M people metropolis, right on top of a major rail and metro hub and across the river from one of the most touristic monument in the world. And even though it’s not really in a shopping area, there are dozens of cafés within 2 minutes on foot. They don’t really have problems getting people to go there. Plus, considering how long hey’ve been in business, I assume they own the building, which shields them from the rent issue. They could still face problems (like Gibert next door that closed somewhat recently), but their situation is very different from the vast majority of shops in normal European cities (including the UK).
  - ghaff 5mo ago
    Yeah, I walked by the block-long line of people a couple months ago and pretty much crossed it off my mental list. Didn't need another physical book and there is no shortage of cafes in Paris. Also didn't even make a special trip there. I like to stay in the Latin Quarter and happened to be walking by. I agree it's not exactly the random indie bookstore though as it's probably listed in every Paris guidebook.
InsideOutSanta 5mo ago
I suspect, particularly for toy stores, there's also a weird incentive: if they stand alone, you don't want to bring your kids there because it's only going to cost you money. But if they're next to other shops, you can send your kids there to entertain themselves, while you can browse what you actually want to see in peace.
epolanski 5mo ago
That's the overall premise of shopping malls. Get 2-3-4 highly attractive shops that people go to (in Europe, Zara is an example) surrounded by shops that would otherwise die without the proximity/clustering.
piokoch 5mo ago
Yup, that's why molls were so successful. They were deteriorating because of Internet, as a new "moll", covid speed up the process. But, frankly speaking, molls also killed many mom & pops shops scattered in the cities. So this is just evolution, I am not sure if it goes in the right direction, but consumers have the last word and they have spoken, even though, in the long run it hurts them.
- egypturnash 5mo ago
  moll | mäl | noun informal, dated 1 (also gun moll) the female companion of a gangster or other criminal: I'd rush the money over to his moll. 2 a prostitute. I think you probably mean "mall".
- IAmBroom 5mo ago
  "Mall": a physical aggregation of independent stores in a single location, usually renting space from a single landowner. "Moll": a mobster's girlfriend. Your paragraph becomes quite amusing if one assumes you didn't make a typo.
eplatzek 5mo ago
What about the situation where a bunch of flower sellers end up on the same area of town? Hotelling's Law (also known as the Principle of Minimum Differentiation or Hotelling’s Spatial Competition).
baxtr 5mo ago
So basically a tiny mall?
deleted 5mo ago
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pythonbase 5mo ago
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porknbeans00 5mo ago
kids don't want to browse amazon. =)
- GJim 5mo ago
  Aside from the fact you would have to be nuts to buy kids toys (or anything that must meet a safety standard) from Amazon. ... yet some people still do.
michaelbuckbee 5mo ago
I'd be curious to know if you consider a Lego store a "toy store". There's one that opened in my city fairly recently and is in an area of smaller boutique shops (kind of like what you described).
tclancy 5mo ago
Your comment makes me think of this recent post, https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-basket-and-the-booza https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-basket-and-the-booza, from an always wonderful blog which looks at why Australia has far more independent stores left compared to English cities and comes to a surprising conclusion: "The unifying claim is this: chains follow legibility. A city becomes legible to a site-selection algorithm when it has been organised into walkable, transit-connected high streets with predictable pedestrian volumes. That legibility is what good urbanism produces and simultaneously what makes a city capturable."
- ericyd 5mo ago
  Not sure if this is an issue of Australian English vs American English but this is way too jargon-laden to mean anything at all to me.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago
    LLMs can do English-English translations.
  - tclancy 5mo ago
    Oh sorry, the pull quote does seem nonsensical by itself. It's well down in the conclusion of the article which, while written for the semi-layperson, is very heavy on the data science. Essentially it means what we currently think of (for good reason!) as good urban design makes it easier to analyze an area to optimize for profitability.
steveBK123 5mo ago
This makes a lot of sense from my own behavior. If a downtown has multiple places to stop, I am far more likely to go. Better yet if it has attractions for both my wife and me, then we are both more likely to go. Even better - if it has attractions open at different times of day - morning - errands like hardware shop, foods basics | afternoon - cafe, prepared food, more retail shop | evening - sit down dining, bars, checkout a book store. It's always weird how some downtowns only cover a slice of this and as a result are dead after 6pm.. or don't come alive until 5pm.
SoftTalker 5mo ago
> a bookstore, a toy store, and a tea or candy shop This was Borders and B&N, in their prime. A one stop shop. They had a childrens area with books and toys. They had a coffee bar. And of course books.
- datakan 5mo ago
  They still do where I live. Its rather nice but seems to be rotting a bit as every time I go there the kids section is clearly not cleaned or well maintained.
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  That still is what B&N is like.
  - SoftTalker 5mo ago
    I didn't realize there were any left. Both closed up here years ago.
magenta4 5mo ago
That is such a good idea but I always have loved small stores so I might be too optimistic. Let us know if you do it.
carlosjobim 5mo ago
Aren't you worried that your rent will be jacked up 100% or more in case you successfully revitalize the area?
yummypaint 5mo ago
This is exactly the business model of Poor Richards in Colorado Springs. They have a pizzarea, book store, and toy store. It's been around for decades and is a local institution.
thepryz 5mo ago
That seems to be what Barnes and Noble has become. Every store now has books, toys, and a coffee shop inside and it seems they’ve been thriving in the last few years. My biggest complaint though is that the bargain bin no longer contains books they are cycling out but instead seems to be books and other items specifically meant to be sold in the bargain bin.

hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago

I have seen bookstore (second-handed books) thriving near universities. Your idea is actually very interesting and remind me of the mall model -- the mall model worked because everyone in the family gets his/her own share of pleasure. Of course the traffic matters a lot, too. Hope you start that experiment soon and succeed!

ghaff 5mo ago
The general theory of most malls was that you had anchor stores. My local one has a couple of stores adjacent to the mall (a local chain supermarket and and Home Depot) that are very busy, almost too much so. The mall itself is pretty much dead and has been on the market for ages. The anchor stores--JCPenney, Sears, and Macy's are all long gone. Haven't been in the actual mall in ages but I assume it's pretty sad and there seem very few cars in the lots. Oh, yeah, the Toys 'R Us in the complex is long gone too.
- hnthrowaway0315 5mo ago
  It's pretty much the same in my place, too. The old malls are dying. There are new malls coming up, but I'm not sure how they are going to hold in the future.
  - ghaff 4mo ago
    Luxury malls in cities aren't really my thing and there are even some higher-end suburban malls where Apple stores seem to have become an anchor store in this day and age that I would have laughed at once upon a time--shows how much I know. I will say I have walked into some malls in Vegas and only half-hyperbolically thought I couldn't (and/or wouldn't want) to have afforded pretty much anything.
    - hnthrowaway0315 4mo ago
      I'm not into them either. I'm more into second-handed bookstores where I might get some pleasant surprises once for a while.
TheOtherHobbes 5mo ago
Universities are effectively ultra-anchors. You have large numbers of students from mostly middle class backgrounds, many of whom have free time and disposable income. (Or at least they're not worried about their loans yet.) And then you have the academics. Tenured profs are relatively well paid. Adjuncts/assistants not so much, but they still like nice things. The UK's public school towns (Marlborough, Harrow, Winchester...) often have a prosperous independent store economy on a smaller scale, for the same reasons. Clusters work well in these towns. If you try them elsewhere, like one of the UK's many run-down towns, they're more likely to fail because the prosperity just isn't there.

ricardonunez 5mo ago

I always wanted to open an indie book store + coffee shop and had a similar analysis. I read recently they are having a come back. Barnes and noble is opening in my city after a decade ago books a million closed and our local indie closed during Covid.

deleted 5mo ago

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bombcar 5mo ago

The thing I've noticed is that even dying downtowns want insane amounts of rent; I think you have to be able to buy the building to make it work. However, that's not as unrealistic as it may seem, because the city itself often owns a decent amount of downtown, and can make a deal.

expedition32 4mo ago
For the companies that own all that real estate it's better to let them sit empty for years than lower the rent. But eventually the hammer always falls.
vasco 5mo ago
If the only way to be successful is to start by buying multiple downtown locations outright I think we know why the downtown is empty. Nobody is going to do that to open a shop. Not even the mega chains are usually buying anything.
- colechristensen 5mo ago
  The path to the return of main street is bullying your city council to attach ridiculous property tax penalties for any vacancies for whatever the central business district commercial zone is and not allow land zoned in that fashion to change. Force the rents and property values down until a competitive market rate is arrived at naturally. Punish the greed that attempts to store or preserve value by leaving things vacant for years.
  - gizajob 5mo ago
    You’re right but it seems like the exact opposite scenario is usually in effect. Particularly in the UK, landlords seem stuck in some kind of bizarre logic of “oh, nobody can rent my building, it just has to sit here being worth nothing” and “oh, you want my worthless building, then naturally I’ll need ALL your profit and more.”
    - 5mo ago

twunde 5mo ago

I can't comment about the minimum number of stores, but I do think its the correct idea. I live in a town of ~12000. We have 6.5 bookstores (including the good local thrift store as .5). Stores/restaurants do turn over fairly regularly, so its still tough, but it certainly seems viable. We get a good number of tourists, which helps but I do think you need a mix of restaurants, and a mix of different types of stores. Even as you go to nearby towns with big box stores, they all have downtowns that are doing ok with locally run businesses. Notably the downtowns all are small business focused with few if any box stores

wodenokoto 5mo ago

Tsutaya, a Japanese dvd rental store has a specialty shop in Hiroshima. It’s best described as a library hosting a small electronics store, a clothing store, a stationery shop and a coffee shop.

The_Blade 5mo ago

(In slight contrast to my other comment) I think Larimer Square in Denver is trying to do something akin. There was a land-edge-lord kerfuffle and gone are staples like The Market and Ted’s Montana Grill (RIP, I was also just in Bozeman). rn one side is bookstore - jewelry & artsy - African jewelry & artsy - Rioja (Denver famous food) - John Fluevog (Vancouver shoes) - Osteria Marco (Denver less famous Italian) - Van Leewuen (NYC ice cream). I hope it all works... now, bookstores here are a whole other mess. two words, Tattered Cover. there are ample used bookstores, though, i found a copy of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals for $6.50 on Colfax that should probably be handled with BSL-3 precaution which is as it should be

ahartmetz 5mo ago

I know someone who used to manage department stores (one branch at a time, several locations). He talked about clusters in a very similar way: Stores need nearby other stores to be attractive.

ncallaway 5mo ago

I take my two little ones almost weekly to our small downtown area. The trip is usually a coffee shop, the bookstore, and a rotating third one (sometimes a candy shop sometimes the toy store, sometimes something else). Anyway, we're an N=1 confirmation of that theory.

a1o 5mo ago
In our case the coffee shop is in the bookstore and it is located right in front of the third. The third is a really nice park (think lake and lots of playgrounds plus activities).

me_smith 5mo ago

This is a timely comment for me. I have been doing research on opening a small indie (new/used) bookstore in a small old downtown I walk through almost every day. It has restaurants, specialty shops, coffee shops and a small local grocery store. I've always thought it was missing a bookstore. Any tips/warnings that might not be immediately obvious to a hopeful bookstore owner? Do you think there is a sweet spot in terms of square footage of retail space? Margins are low so do you supplement with sidelines/events/memberships? One of my next steps is to join the ABA as a provisional member to get access to their new bookseller guides.

mattbrewsbytes 5mo ago
I'm just an internet commenter who knows nothing about running a retail store and has thought about a bookstore as well. With that out of the way, finding high margin items to sell to offset low margin items would make sense. I think this is why you see coffee paired with bookstores, coffee should be high margin but might also require food licensing/inspections. Ideas for a local bookstore: seasonal and local items for sale, think gift giving timeframes - mothers day, fathers day, end of year holidays. Items like unique greeting cards, calendars, custom gift wrapping, having a kids section with higher margin items kids like - toys, trading cards, etc. Also you could throw some checkout friendly things like book lights, book marks, candies, etc. If you find local craftspeople, offer some shelf/floor space for free if you can agree on a split of the margin. Hand-crafted things would pair well during holiday seasons and advertised properly might get repeat visits and word of mouth spreading.
- me_smith 5mo ago
  Thanks for the comment and ideas. I was thinking through the different types of things that could be sidelines. You hit on many of them. There are some cultural festivals that occur in the downtown that can bring opportunities for some local craftspeople to share retail space before and after the festivals. Also, some branded items that go well with books like totes and bookmarks.
- pstuart 5mo ago
  And if there was space for it, hosting board/card games.

jmyeet 5mo ago

So there are a few versions of this. The most common in the US is the strip mall. This is a largely American, soulless construct of commercial space with parking out front, typically on a major road. There are lots of reasons why this flourished in the US. It's a symptom of society being so car-dependent, which is by design. Rents here are typically lower than other options so some businesses can survive in strip malls that can't elsewhere. The next step up (density-wise) are actual malls, or shopping centers for the non-Americans. There are different versions of this. You have the entirely indoor mall. You also have other anchor stores that pop up nearby (eg Home Depot) that are popular but can't justify the mall rent costs. Often a bunch of other businesses will sprout around these stores, which is why they're called anchor stores. Anchor stores are also things you generally need in a mall to bring in enough traffic to make the whole thing economical eg supermarkets, department stores. Malls in general have been dying in droves. Basically too many got built in the 1970s through 1990s and online shopping is killing them. There are photography and video channels dedicated to exploring dead malls. The third rarest option is the walkable district. This is generally the downtown of cities that existed before cars. People generally love these but public transit is an issue. Americans always want to drive even when there are viable options otherwise. That means having to build parking garages and the whole thing kinda falls apart. Or at least it losses some of its charm. The hellish end of this spectrum is Houston. Some cities have managed to rejuvenate such areas by diverting traffic and generally investing in the area. But what tends to always happen is that businesses will rejuvenate an area and then the landlords will kill it by charging exorbitant rents. I've seen 40+ year old restaurants close because of rent hikes in areas that only really existed for that restaurant. This is part of the problem with housing being so expensive. It makes everything expensive. That local shops? Well it costs as much to build as a house and a house is easier to sell. But a cafe or a bakery or a bookstore or some other eclectic shop can survive when the rent is $20,000/year. You don't need to pay staff as much when houses cost $100k not $1M. Expensive housing just strangles everything. But when that rent goes to $200,000 over a decade well then suddenly only chain stores and big box retail can survive there so what was once a charming downtown turns into Chili's, a CVS and a Chase bank. So this can go wrong even in dense places like NYC. There's a real issue right now with so-called "zombie leases". Basically, companies like CVS, Duane Reade and Walgreens signed high-rent long-term leases but then decided to close the store. The store remains empty because the owner has no incentive to rent it for a now-lower market rent while the billion dollar company is still on the hook for it. Enough of these and a street can look abandoned. I really think that when cities choose to rejuvenate an area they should acquire all of it first. Eminent domain, baby. I saw a Tiktok awhile ago where someone posited that things we once took for granted get taken away from us and sold back to us. The specific example was walkable cities. That used to be the norm. Now it's a luxury. We can't have that. If people walk everywhere and take a train or bus well then they might not buy a car. Then they'r enot buying insurance and gas and maintaining it. Unacceptable. Society really is getting dystopian.

vonnik 5mo ago

This strategy has worked well for both Shakespeare and Co. in Paris and Shakespeare and Sons in Berlin. Books + Bakery + Coffee. Both of course are set in living pedestrian cities. https://www.shakespeareandsons.com https://www.shakespeareandsons.com

golem14 5mo ago
It has not worked for Borders in Palo Alto. But that was a chain, maybe other locations forced closured everywhere, and that Borders could have survived. I doubt it, however.
kergonath 5mo ago
I can’t comment on the shop in Berlin, but the one in Paris is a special case. It’s in a relatively central location in a 11M people metropolis, right on top of a major rail and metro hub and across the river from one of the most touristic monument in the world. And even though it’s not really in a shopping area, there are dozens of cafés within 2 minutes on foot. They don’t really have problems getting people to go there. Plus, considering how long hey’ve been in business, I assume they own the building, which shields them from the rent issue. They could still face problems (like Gibert next door that closed somewhat recently), but their situation is very different from the vast majority of shops in normal European cities (including the UK).
- ghaff 5mo ago
  Yeah, I walked by the block-long line of people a couple months ago and pretty much crossed it off my mental list. Didn't need another physical book and there is no shortage of cafes in Paris. Also didn't even make a special trip there. I like to stay in the Latin Quarter and happened to be walking by. I agree it's not exactly the random indie bookstore though as it's probably listed in every Paris guidebook.

InsideOutSanta 5mo ago

I suspect, particularly for toy stores, there's also a weird incentive: if they stand alone, you don't want to bring your kids there because it's only going to cost you money. But if they're next to other shops, you can send your kids there to entertain themselves, while you can browse what you actually want to see in peace.

epolanski 5mo ago

That's the overall premise of shopping malls. Get 2-3-4 highly attractive shops that people go to (in Europe, Zara is an example) surrounded by shops that would otherwise die without the proximity/clustering.

piokoch 5mo ago

Yup, that's why molls were so successful. They were deteriorating because of Internet, as a new "moll", covid speed up the process. But, frankly speaking, molls also killed many mom & pops shops scattered in the cities. So this is just evolution, I am not sure if it goes in the right direction, but consumers have the last word and they have spoken, even though, in the long run it hurts them.

egypturnash 5mo ago
moll | mäl | noun informal, dated 1 (also gun moll) the female companion of a gangster or other criminal: I'd rush the money over to his moll. 2 a prostitute. I think you probably mean "mall".
IAmBroom 5mo ago
"Mall": a physical aggregation of independent stores in a single location, usually renting space from a single landowner. "Moll": a mobster's girlfriend. Your paragraph becomes quite amusing if one assumes you didn't make a typo.

eplatzek 5mo ago

What about the situation where a bunch of flower sellers end up on the same area of town? Hotelling's Law (also known as the Principle of Minimum Differentiation or Hotelling’s Spatial Competition).

baxtr 5mo ago

So basically a tiny mall?

deleted 5mo ago

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pythonbase 5mo ago

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porknbeans00 5mo ago

kids don't want to browse amazon. =)

GJim 5mo ago
Aside from the fact you would have to be nuts to buy kids toys (or anything that must meet a safety standard) from Amazon. ... yet some people still do.

michaelbuckbee 5mo ago

I'd be curious to know if you consider a Lego store a "toy store". There's one that opened in my city fairly recently and is in an area of smaller boutique shops (kind of like what you described).

tclancy 5mo ago

Your comment makes me think of this recent post, https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-basket-and-the-booza https://laurenleek.substack.com/p/the-basket-and-the-booza, from an always wonderful blog which looks at why Australia has far more independent stores left compared to English cities and comes to a surprising conclusion: "The unifying claim is this: chains follow legibility. A city becomes legible to a site-selection algorithm when it has been organised into walkable, transit-connected high streets with predictable pedestrian volumes. That legibility is what good urbanism produces and simultaneously what makes a city capturable."

ericyd 5mo ago
Not sure if this is an issue of Australian English vs American English but this is way too jargon-laden to mean anything at all to me.
- kevin_thibedeau 5mo ago
  LLMs can do English-English translations.
- tclancy 5mo ago
  Oh sorry, the pull quote does seem nonsensical by itself. It's well down in the conclusion of the article which, while written for the semi-layperson, is very heavy on the data science. Essentially it means what we currently think of (for good reason!) as good urban design makes it easier to analyze an area to optimize for profitability.

steveBK123 5mo ago

This makes a lot of sense from my own behavior. If a downtown has multiple places to stop, I am far more likely to go. Better yet if it has attractions for both my wife and me, then we are both more likely to go. Even better - if it has attractions open at different times of day - morning - errands like hardware shop, foods basics | afternoon - cafe, prepared food, more retail shop | evening - sit down dining, bars, checkout a book store. It's always weird how some downtowns only cover a slice of this and as a result are dead after 6pm.. or don't come alive until 5pm.

SoftTalker 5mo ago

> a bookstore, a toy store, and a tea or candy shop This was Borders and B&N, in their prime. A one stop shop. They had a childrens area with books and toys. They had a coffee bar. And of course books.

datakan 5mo ago
They still do where I live. Its rather nice but seems to be rotting a bit as every time I go there the kids section is clearly not cleaned or well maintained.
bigstrat2003 5mo ago
That still is what B&N is like.
- SoftTalker 5mo ago
  I didn't realize there were any left. Both closed up here years ago.

magenta4 5mo ago

That is such a good idea but I always have loved small stores so I might be too optimistic. Let us know if you do it.

carlosjobim 5mo ago

Aren't you worried that your rent will be jacked up 100% or more in case you successfully revitalize the area?

yummypaint 5mo ago

This is exactly the business model of Poor Richards in Colorado Springs. They have a pizzarea, book store, and toy store. It's been around for decades and is a local institution.

thepryz 5mo ago

That seems to be what Barnes and Noble has become. Every store now has books, toys, and a coffee shop inside and it seems they’ve been thriving in the last few years. My biggest complaint though is that the bargain bin no longer contains books they are cycling out but instead seems to be books and other items specifically meant to be sold in the bargain bin.