Setting Up Shop

Plinky asked, “If you were going to open up a shop, what would you sell? Food? Cloth­ing? Books?”

Books and needle­work items! My for­mer part­ner and I used to dream about open­ing a com­bi­na­tion book/stitching/gaming/coffee shop. 

Of course, inde­pen­dent book­stores are near­ly dead, and even Bor­ders is dead now thanks to Amazon.

Lit­tle needle­work shops have almost total­ly dis­ap­peared because they can’t com­pete with the prices Michael’s and Joann Crafts can offer, or pro­vide the same range of prod­ucts that inter­net shops can provide.

I’d need a part­ner to run the gam­ing side, and I doubt there’s a whole lot of prof­it for that. The one gam­ing shop I ever vis­it­ed reg­u­lar­ly was The War­Room in Nor­cross, and it is long gone. The peo­ple who ran that place cer­tain­ly seemed to know what they were doing.

Cof­fee shops have to com­pete with Star­bucks, but that part was less for itself than as an adjunct to the rest. They only seem to have any hope of suc­cess if they have some kind of spe­cial draw, like live music (which I love anyway)

We talked about com­bin­ing our pas­sions know­ing that any one of those things would­n’t stand alone, and think­ing that per­haps they could make it in combination. 

We knew it was a dream, though — just a dream, noth­ing more. It would take a lot of cap­i­tal to even start such a thing, much less keep it going. Then there was the lit­tle mat­ter of me being 1) dis­abled, and not up to work­ing even a part-time job, much less putting in the hours it takes to make a go of a small busi­ness; and 2) an intro­vert who does­n’t deal with a lot of peo­ple well. 

It’s good to have dreams, though.