Small is Successful

Savvy local retailers don’t let the big box stores box them in

by Carl Frankel and illustrations by Jason Cring, February 24, 2010

Are you inclined toward paranoia? Does the dark side attract you? If so, here’s a friendly suggestion: Launch your own small business—and, better yet, make it retail.

Why? Because the environment for locally owned enterprise borders these days on the nightmarish, with bogeymen at every turn. Margins are shrinking, the Great Recession’s clouds are everywhere—and then there are the big-box stores.

Ah yes: the big-box stores. Wherever you go, there they are—the Staples, Sam’s Clubs, and Lowe’s of the world, littering the landscape like oversize droppings from the Planet of the Terminators. If the view from progressive quarters is to believed, these national retailers are The Enemy, come to obliterate locally owned businesses and supplant local culture with a cheap homogenized knock-off of everything that’s real.

By all appearances, they’re doing a good job of it, too. Just check out the parking lot at a Home Depot or Best Buy, then visit our sleepy Main Streets—that’ll tell you pretty much everything you need to know. And wait, there’s worse! According to Frank Cohen, owner of Sun Wallpaper and Paint, an entire generation has come to view the national companies as their only real brick-and-mortar shopping option. “The rewards of shopping locally are lost on under-35-year-olds,” he says. “They only know the big chain stores.”

Is everything lost, then? Will the big-box Terminators terminate small business as we know it? Are we doomed to a future of heartless retail uniformity?

The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is no. There is a future for small business. For proof, we need look no further than the Hudson Valley, where more than a few locally-owned enterprises are holding their own (or better) against the big-box stores.

Let’s start with Sun Wallpaper and Paint, with stores in Poughkeepsie, Fishkill, and Beacon. The business, which has been in operation for about a century, was purchased in 1950 by the parents of Frank Cohen, the current owner, who joined the business after graduating from college in 1978. Under Cohen’s leadership, the company has thrived and is currently, he reports, “healthy and well capitalized.”