Memory Lane
Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.
Thursday, December 04, 2003
Sandlots shops and other shit
Here in Western Australia, Perth in particular, we have sand all the way from surface to bedrock. Greyish sand, yellowish sand, sand with humus in it if we garden, sand with black mangrove mud through it if we live on reclaimed low-lying areas. You get the idea, we have sand sand and more sand.
And sand can actually support grass, trees, and decent vegetation. It's supported native plants for millennia, and it can support our imported plants as well. In fact, surprisingly, the sand also supports some rather large buildings. A geologist friend of mine shudders every time he sees the Business District, he reckons one decent wash of water over the place and all those buildings will just sink below the surface because bedrock is hundreds of feet down - and sand all the way down to there.
And those businesses, they vary in how successful they are, because of what they plant outside. In Perth's CBD, they get the Council to plant parks and verges, anywhere that can be planted, is planted. It's one of the reasons I love Perth so much, you can drive along the coastal highway for miles and look towards the most densely packed suburbs and all you really see is an expanse of trees and vegetation with rooves showing here and there. It's one of the bonuses of living here.
The most successful businesses outside the CBD have their verge sorted out, they have a nature strip with decent plantings of green and flowering plants, and if they don't, well not only do they look dodgy, they usually don't do all that well either. The other day I drove past several one and two dollar stores with dried up bushes around the doors, sand blowing over their footpaths, and went to a slightly more expensive cheap shop to buy my plastic tub for soaking mulch in. This store was in a shop and carpark complex but they laid it out neat and clean, a kind of 'we can't plant neat rows of stuff on asphalt but dammit we'll keep it clean and the kerbs painted and the buildings looking neat!'
I was immediately impressed, and several things about this struck me. If you take premises which have some garden outside, you damn well better look after it. A dodgy slovenly looking piece of ill-cared brownery makes customers wonder if they won't get the same neglect, and if the stock inside has been similarly left to age, and many of the bypass those premises. Places like this, I've found, usually cater to a fanatic specialty crowd who just need the goods and will go to any lengths to secure their curtain material or fishing tackle or whatever.
Anyone that doesn't have a special interest group niche and has a crappy surrounding and exterior, well you usually find the wrecking ball swinging there within a few years at the outside. And Feng Shuei claims that since old times - keep your Feng Shuei clean and neat and you will be successful. They knew a thing or two, did those Chinese.
So - shops with better gardens - do they really do better? Hell yeah - after all, they can afford a gardener to maintain the place, they can afford to replace tatty looking plants, and they couldn't do that if they were going broke... By starting out looking affluent and well-cared-for, they have established a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd shop there because my gut would say 'hey those people have a well-tended shop' and I'd believe they were more well-off than the dodgy-looking shop with the blasted desert outside.
People will tell you that 'the product sells itself, it really does' and you can look them straight back in the eye and say 'nope - my hard work setting up my shop and the fifteen feet out front, THAT sells the product' and you'd be right.
Packaging of a product starts in the carpark.
These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.
I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.
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