|
| News
| Sports | Business
| Opinions | Columns
| Entertainment |
| Science/Technology| Weather
| Archives | E-mail
Us |
Sunday, March 5, 2000
A specialty retailer is lost
The times changed for hobby shop
It would be easy to blame the demise of a 25-year-old family-owned retail store on the Internet, but the owners of Leisure Time Hobbies say it's not that simple.
Yes, the Internet was another thorn for the longtime Gulfway Shopping Center tenant, says Rosemary Fischer, whose husband, Delray, started the store. It was tough to beat discount pricing plus make up for the sales tax, which isn't charged on Internet purchases.
"People use your expertise to figure out what they want and then they go out and order it," she said. "And some of them have come back to tell us how much they saved."
But mail-order companies provided the same kind of competition for a much longer time, says Fischer, her daughter, Lynn Norsworthy, and son-in-law, Hugh Norsworthy.
Other competition came from large retail chains that are able to buy in larger quantities, pass on the savings and make their money off volume. There wasn't any one antagonist to point out - Wal-Mart, Kmart, The Home Depot, Toys 'R' Us.
"Not all of them carried everything we do," Rosemary Fischer said, "but all of them carried some."
And there was the local economy. The store never quite recovered from the decrease in sales that started with the oil bust of the late 1980s, the family members said. The store's performance reflected the city's underwhelming economic growth since then, they said.
"Whenever a new store opens in a city that's not necessarily growing," Hugh Norsworthy said, "it takes something away from the rest of us."
"None of us were hobbyists," Rosemary Fischer said. "We ran it as a business."
Over the years, the store grew from 2,000 square feet of floor space to 12,000, then shrank to 6,000, said Lynn Norsworthy. In recent years, she said, the store survived by trimming back on lines of inventory. "We just were able to keep going this long because we're frugal."
That frugality included a shrinking staff, from a peak of 25 employees, to eight - four of them the family members.
Now, the shelves are becoming bare, there's a clearance sale on everything, including the display cases, and the store's last day of existence is March 11.
The store's niche as the place to find what couldn't be found elsewhere eventually became a bottom-line liability.
"We became the last place for people to check for stuff," Hugh Norsworthy said, "and that's a bad place to be." Their attitude is no-hard-feelings philosophical. When they shop, they bargain-hunt just like everybody else.
"We'll complain about it but when we go to our distributors we look for the best price," Lynn Norsworthy said, "so we do the same thing."
Now, Delray and Rosemary Fischer are planning to stay fully retired. Rosemary is taking oil painting lessons, her daughter will look for a job and her son-in-law is working on an associate's degree in computer programming. Welcome to the new economy.
"It's just that the whole world of retailing has changed," Lynn Norsworthy said.
For better or worse.
Tom Whitehurst
| Talk
about this story | Home |
© 2000
Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard
newspaper. All rights reserved.
|
 |
 |
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
|
