Three years before the succession, this was the story of a business that lost sight of who it was, whom it served, and how it made money.
Business failures seem sudden, but they build slowly. Mel and Tom don't notice the gradual decline because each lost sale or customer blends into the routines of their day.
One day, Mel saw it happen with one of their best customers, Louise.
It's called showrooming. Louise, a loyal customer for eleven years, stood in aisle two, took a picture of a tube of watercolor paint with her phone, checked elsewhere online for price, put the paint back, and left. The store served as a showroom while the online store with lower prices got the sale.
Mel watched as one of her regulars walked out the door empty-handed. Mel began to think about the other ways her store is losing business: a couple downgrading their purchases to save money, students arriving for their classes with supplies in Amazon boxes, and more and more customers requesting a price match—the events repeated themselves over and over.
Each moment felt separate—a bad sale, a demanding customer. Mel focused on what was in front of her, not the bigger picture.
Today's customers browse, ask questions, and leave to buy elsewhere. Mel didn't know the term, but "showrooming" had quietly eroded profits for years.
While Mel began to notice shifts on the sales floor, Tom was seeing a different problem in the back office.
By mid-March, Tom, who managed the books and dealt with vendors, called their main supplier again to ask for more time to pay, just this once, to help with cash flow.
The credit manager understood. The credit manager had been getting that call from many independent retailers lately.
Tom hung up, sat at his desk in the back, and looked at shelves of unsold inventory: colored pencils that hadn't moved, watercolor sets on a marked-down end-cap still unsold in April. He turned to his laptop and started forecasting their next back-to-school season. The deadline for extended payment terms was looming, and his vendor reps were calling for their orders.
Tom tried to balance cash flow with back-to-school inventory. Unsure how to handle the crisis, all he could think of was to buy more inventory, hoping sales would save them—same strategy for new problems.
Tom was missing the obvious: the solution to both problems was sitting on the shelf in his back room and on the sales floor. He didn't realize that much of their money, money he desperately needed in these slower months, was tied up in dead and slow-moving inventory. Nor could he see that his current out-of-stocks on in-demand SKUs were costing him sales.
To Tom, inventory should always be full to generate sales. He didn't realize how much cash was sitting on the shelves, doing nothing.
So he kept calling vendors. And juggling his payments, and writing orders.
Underlying Mel's unseen pattern and Tom's missing cash was their shared constraint.
They had no time.
Payroll was as lean as it could be: three full-time employees and a part-time bookkeeper. Health insurance and rent had gone up, as needed for competitive wages to attract and retain good employees. So, Tom and Mel, after over two decades owning their business, put their heads down and worked harder. They were beginning to wonder whether it was worth it any longer.
Mel and Tom both worked long hours in the store, covering every task but leaving no time to step back, assess, or strategize.
So they did what people do when they don't have time to think. They reacted.
If a customer asked for a brand they didn't carry, Mel ordered it. If a category was slow, Tom ran a sale. If a regular complained about a price, they matched it. When a class instructor wanted to add a Saturday, they added it. If a vendor offered a deal on a new product line, they took it. The flyer went out every second week of the month, as it had been, and no one had checked whether it was actually working.
Marketing was haphazard. Inventory reflected vendor influence. Pricing was reactive. Strategy amounted to disconnected decisions made under stress.
They weren't running a store anymore. They were just trying to survive to the next month.
When they finally sat down late at night, after their kids had grown up and moved out and the house was quiet, they both turned to the same story to explain what was happening.
Their story blamed Amazon, big-box discounts, platforms selling lookalike knockoffs, and, most painfully, longtime suppliers who launched D2C online stores targeting the very customers they'd cultivated.
That last one wasn't a competition. That was a knife in the back.
Their story also included rising labor and rent, and the power bill in August had been a shock. They felt the odds were against them, that the whole system favored people with giant warehouses and cost structures that didn't depend on every SKU making a profit.
Here's the thing: all the stories Mel and Tom told themselves about outside forces were true, but these weren't the roots of their actual problems. The real issues stemmed from how they managed the business internally.
But Mel and Tom couldn't see that yet. When you're caught up in a story like this, it explains everything: why you're tired, why the numbers don't add up, and why customers don't come in like before. It even gives you a way to keep your dignity when nothing you try seems to work. Of course, nothing worked—look at what they were facing.
The story didn't offer any solutions. If the problem was Amazon, the only answer was to become Amazon, and they couldn't do that. So the story led to just one outcome.
The place it led for Mel and Tom was the kitchen, on a Sunday night in late March, with the bookkeeper's quarterly summary on the table between them.
Neither one of them said the word. They didn't have to. They'd been circling it for months.
Liquidate.
Liquidate. Auction inventory, pay vendors what they could, give Dave and Josh severance. Sell the lease back. After twenty-three years, the store was now worth less every quarter; the only likely buyer was an auction house.
Some mornings now, Mel would open her eyes at 5:40, and the first thought was, "Is today the day we get crushed?" And right behind it, quieter and worse: is this still worth it?
She felt guilty every time. Dave had turned down a salaried job at a frame shop in the city to stay. Josh's wife was pregnant with their second child. The regulars brought zucchini in August and cookies at Christmas. You don't walk away from that because you're tired. You don't liquidate a community resource because it's hard.
But retail has always been hard. But never like this.
So when a flyer crossed Mel's desk in early April — a two-day out-of-town seminar and workshop for owners of small and mid-sized businesses, run by a consultant who worked with independent retailers and the suppliers who sold to them — she signed up almost out of spite.
She wasn't looking for a plan. She wasn't expecting one. She'd been to these things before. She knew the drill: the keynote that tells you to believe in yourself, the breakouts that tell you things you already know, the vendor hall that sells you software you can't afford for problems you can't quite name.
What Mel needed was forty-eight hours free of her routine and business worries to recall why she opened the store.
Tom didn't argue. He booked the flight and told her to bring back something useful or at least a shot glass from the airport gift shop.
At the gate, Mel wasn't hoping for much—perhaps permission to tell Tom it was time, or to believe they might still save the store.
She got on the plane anyway.
What Mel didn't know, sitting at that gate, was that the three problems she and Tom had been wrestling with separately — the customer they no longer understood, the cash they couldn't find, the time they couldn't make — weren't three problems.
They were one.
For Nora Faria, who inspired this small business fable.
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