Transcripts

ED WADSWORTH: People are saying now that we're closing out that they're sorry to see us go, and they're sad, and so on. But it's the same people that are not buying here anymore.

LEIF ENGER: Ed Wadsworth is the owner of Alexandria Hardware, a store that opened for business in 1898 selling hammers and horse-drawn farm implements. Wadsworth prides himself on his store's personal service and its up-to-date inventory. But in the past few years, he's seen more and more customers take their business out to the edge of town to the growing strip of big discount stores next to the freeway. Now with a huge closeout sale sign blowing in the breeze outside his store, Wadsworth says he's getting out of hardware just in time.

ED WADSWORTH: People are gone. The regular type businesses of clothing, shoes, groceries, and the things that people use every day are gone and replaced by antique stores and that type of thing and craft stores and gift shops and so on.

LEIF ENGER: Downtown Alexandria has changed. Walk down Broadway, and it's like Ed Wadsworth says, specialty stores, boutiques, a baseball card shop, a Christian bookstore, some with pretty storefronts, some not. Traffic is still high, at least in the summer.

But Broadway's anchor stores are mostly gone Bob's Clothing, Woolworths, and the family-run Iverson shoes, which used to sponsor customer essay contests on topics like how to be a good neighbor. If you want shoes now, you go out to the mall or Pamida or Walmart or Kmart or the new Target that opens this weekend. Target manager Blake Evert, who transferred here from the St. Cloud store, allows that Main Street retailers can't compete with the big discounters on price alone. But, he says, it's not all bad news for downtown.

BLAKE EVERT: I want to be here, to be a part of the community, to actually keep more people here to do more shopping and not just at my store, but to share with some of the other stores in town. If we take some of their business away, I don't know if all of that is avoidable or not.

LEIF ENGER: Target's arrival also means the creation of 140 new jobs a lot of employment in a town of 11,000, even if most of the positions are part time and pay just over minimum wage. The opening of a new Target store in outstate Minnesota means to many shoppers the city has arrived. The prices are cheap. What are we waiting for? Janet Baker is President of the Downtown Merchants Association.

JANET BAKER: You cannot compete directly. You don't compete head on. You figure out what the strong lines are in Kmart, Walmart, Target, those kinds of stores. And then maybe you dwindle those lines down in your own store and build up your other lines. So yeah, you figure out what your niche is or what your position is. You specialize.

LEIF ENGER: Niche marketing is the inevitable buzzword you hear in towns like Alexandria. Many of the stores surviving here are already doing it. Ed Wadsworth may be selling out his line of hardware. But he'll keep on dealing major appliances, which the discount stores don't carry. A sporting goods shop cut out its line of cheap bicycles and now sells fewer but more expensive models. Often, niche marketing means downsizing one's business. Always, it means being willing to change. Professor David Brennan, who directs the Small Business Institute at St. Thomas University, says the influx of discount stores can actually be a catalyst for strengthening Main Street.

DAVID BRENNAN: I think in a lot of cases, when we see a discount store coming in, and we see three or four or five storefronts closing after a matter of months, many of those were probably marginal retailers in the first place. And this is the straw that broke the camel's back.

LEIF ENGER: The remaining retailers, says Janet Baker, find themselves in a new and radically different position, that of supplementary businesses, selling personal service and goods you can't get on the freeway strip. In fact, she says, the downtowners might actually be worse off if the discount stores had not come to town since people would probably drive to whatever nearby city got the new Target or Kmart or Walmart. This way, she says, at least people are staying in Alexandria to shop. And that gives downtown a fighting chance.

JANET BAKER: Competition forces people to, bottom line, get off of it and get onto paying attention to what's going on. If it doesn't destroy you, it can only make you better.

LEIF ENGER: Janet Baker of the Downtown Merchants Association. This is Leif Enger, Minnesota Public Radio, Alexandria.