Final week, I noticed the unhappy information that one in all my favourite retailers was closing its doorways after 22 years of enterprise. Lulu’s Cuts and Toys, which offered youngsters’ toys and haircuts, was a mainstay within the Park Slope neighorhood of Brooklyn. I haven’t got any kids of my very own, however Lulu’s was at all times go-to vacation spot for my nieces’ and nephew’s birthdays and last-minute child bathe foraging. The place was full of mushy, stunning issues — a comfy haven for distinctive and nostalgic discoveries: cute vegetable pun onesies, the traditional whoopie cushion, stretchy rubber rainbow-colored ramen noodles, assorted Harry Potter wizard wands, and many others.
The enterprise introduced its closure with a word taped to the window (and its digital counterpart, a submit on Instagram), signed by the proprietor Brigitte Prat, and her daughter Lulu, the shop’s namesake. It learn, partly:
As a single mom and first-generation American, this group is just not solely the place I grew my enterprise’s roots, it’s the place I raised my daughter. Given the continued progress of big-box on-line procuring (Amazon, and many others.), it’s sadly not viable to maintain our small enterprise thriving with a storefront.
We hope this serves as a reminder to help small companies in the neighborhood. Their merchandise could also be $1 or $2 greater than Amazon (however typically, they’re cheaper!), and in change, you get personalised customer support, extra native jobs, extra earnings circulating inside the group (and out of multi-billionaires’ fingers), a procuring expertise that’s higher for the setting and a neighborhood that looks like a neighborhood and never a company strip mall.
