Birch and Boar shuts its doors.
Who do we blame?
I don’t know if you folks feel this way but summer is a hard time to try to care about anything - let alone care enough about it to write a whole darn newsletter about it. Between work cranking up, the beautiful summer weather, vacation, gardening, lake days, it just feels like the volume on municipal things goes down a bit in the (smokeless) summer months.
But, every now and then, something DOES happen that brings the volume back up to 11 and that ol’ newsletter flame glows angry and red.
I tried to get it out of my system by yammering endlessly to my poor fiancé and Britt really tried her best to humour me on this one while we floated lazily on Eena Lake yesterday, yet still, it ended with me sitting at my keyboard Sunday night, tip tappin’ away.
So, here’s a really long newsletter.
The Public Narrative
I just want to begin by saying that I love Birch and Boar. I’ve been lucky enough to do work with them over the years and have come to know most of the ownership group well - they’re good people. As far downtown businesses go, I would fiercely argue that their umbrella is the foundation (Nancy O’s, Betulla, and eventually B&B) of things that make our downtown cool and exciting right now.
The owners making this decision is painful and if you’ve spent time talking to them, you’d know that they fought like hell to try and find a way to keep the doors open over the last couple years.
The discourse around their closing has been a bit fraught. Their own explanation/caption is a bit damming and digging into the comments on the post, or if you find yourself on Twitter, there’s no shortage of takes pointing fingers in each direction.
So how do you square all of this into something clear?
A universal truth I have come to understand (mostly by observing the insanity of American politics over the last decade) is that we have an innate sense to turn any event that happens into a story that fits our overarching world narrative, regardless of how sensical or nonsensical it may be.
Downtown is a ****hole full of homeless people and danger - obviously Birch & Boar couldn’t survive in that environment.
Box stores are slowly taking away any ability for small business to survive - Birch & Boar never stood a chance against Costco.
Groceries are ALREADY so expensive - how could Birch & Boar expect us to pay that price for those products!? No doubt no one shops there.
I could go on and on but hopefully you get my point.
There’s truth inside of each of these comments but, as we’ll get to at the end, the truth is rarely so simple.
“It’s the city’s fault” vs “When was the last time YOU shopped downtown”?
I wanted to break Vilma’s comment out separately because A) I think it comes from a good place, and clearly got a ton of support from folks still in the PG Twittersphere, B) I think it’s the most important narrative to get in front of, and C) I love Vilma (and STILL think she got robbed on the self portrait challenge a couple weeks ago #teamVilma).
Where I challenge Vilma’s take here is that shaming people is just not an effective way to change consumer behaviour and so while I know that it is a sentiment that comes from a place of trying to inspire change in PG, and owning up to our role in this feels like the virtuous thing to do, all data that I can find on this topic is that shame and “accountability” are just not going to drive consumer behaviour in any positive direction.
Put more simply, we can’t shame people into coming downtown to shop.
The truth, as I’ve come to see it, is that if you make a good product, people WILL come and in my sad opinion, our downtown is not a good product right now.
And so when folks say IT IS YOU, PG RESIDENTS choosing to not go downtown and shop, I guess I would softly counter with “but surely you understand why…?”
I want to end this section by saying this: there is A LOT cool stuff downtown.
I spend a lot of my free time downtown - I am a regular at multiple businesses (whose owners I know read this newsletter). If your takeaway from B&B closing their doors is alongside Vilma’s tweet and you use this as motivation to get a coffee at Ritual and then shop at Dandy Lines and then eat a bannock donut from House of Ancestors, please PLEASE go do that. Bring a friend. Bring many friends.
Our behaviour is a piece of this pie and if we can shift some of that, then please shift.
The point I’m hoping to make is that just isn’t enough. It isn’t a winning strategy for the masses and though it feels like it’s the right place to go, it isn’t. More importantly, if we rest our hat on the idea that WE are the problem, and hope that is enough, then we’re going to see many more doors close.
The Truth Sucks and is Way Less Interesting
I’ll say this first - I am not an economist and I am definitely not trying to say I’m capturing the whole picture here but here’s the best bullet list summary I can put together on how I understand the state of being a downtown business:
Biggest picture first: the economy has been ROUGH for a few years. I don’t know about you folks but we just have less money to spend on things right now and have had to make budgetary choices for our household that often mean we don’t have a ton of leftover money for eating out.
Downtown(s) in ALL Canadian cities are enduring huge problems that are not just local to this little Northern city. Businesses are being forced to endure those alongside downtown(s) and local governments and provincial governments cannot figure out how to band together to help save people’s lives and livelihoods.
The problems that ARE local to PG (our sprawl, our lack of walkability, our crummy transit, our lack of bike lanes, our failing infrastructure, no ability for the city to creative incentives or breaks for businesses to be downtown and general lack of resources to do anything about any of it) continue to spiral down because, well, sprawling a city like this is REALLY expensive and you don’t have much money left to do cool **** when you spend it all on fixing roads at the edges of the city.
Being a downtown business is expensive - like I really don’t think people understand how expensive the lease rates on these buildings are because they’re purposely obscured on realtor/lease websites. I’ve looked MANY times at simple office spaces and each one of them is more than the mortgage on my house /month.
Our downtown is in UNDENIABLY rough shape from a pedestrian’s perspective. Boarded up buildings, empty storefronts on prime streets, gigantic ugly parking lots, few benches and fewer trees. I don’t want to beat this one to death but if you park by Homework, for example, and wanted to walk to B&B, it’s a REALLY tough sell.
These bullet points come together in something that I can only describe as a gross municipal gloop of bad policy, poor leadership, and a mismanaged downtown. It’s a gloop that feasts on beloved businesses that operate with thin margins - The Makerie, Birch and Boar - hopefully not, but likely others to come unless we do something about all of this.
An Attempted Conclusion
“So what then, Darrin? We just throw up our arms and watch beloved businesses go out of business?”
Definitely not but we can’t be applying force to each other rather than the bigger, more powerful forces at play here.
The crime and safety problems downtown are a part of this and I would be wrong to dismiss that. The owners of B&B have lived and breathed the reality of owning a business downtown for years and years.
But I also have to use some of the bigger principles of books like Strong Towns and Dream Cities and Stroll and say that there are HUGE invisible forces at play in our downtown that exacerbate these feelings and if you aren’t looking for them, you’ll mistake the symptom for the disease.
Sorry to repeat myself but I’m beating this drum one final time today:
if our downtown was more walkable,
if there was more mixed-use building (residential and commercial),
if there was better transit,
if our city was less sprawled,
if our streets were narrower and our sidewalks wider,
if there was protected bike infrastructure across the city,
if there were more benches and trees,
if there were more city-funded events,
if there was enforcement on vacant buildings,
IF all of those things were even slightly more true today than they were 6 months ago, our downtown would be an entirely different place from an economic perspective, from a safety perspective, and from a *vibes* perspective.
But it isn’t. Sadly, it feels kind of like we’re sliding in the opposite direction most days? I know municipal government is not a speedy machine but I really struggle to find the good news stories these days.
And I guess I would just say that these are the things that we can be mad about and we CAN apply pressure to our elected officials rather than applying pressure to each other.
Thanks for reading!
As far as recommendations go this week, I think it’s only appropriate that I say you should go down to Birch & Boar and say thank you to the good people who have been supplying us with delicious meats and treats over the years and ALSO, hopefully scoop my favourite B&B meal - the frozen ramen.
Take care everyone!
Darrin, I always appreciate your balance and how you really try to see the big picture. I agree with your assessments, and I do think there is a place there for adding increased crime management to your list. All of these things play a part in the demise of a business. Each of us will likely weight one or another factor over the others, but there's rarely a single cause.
I especially agree with you that shaming people is not going to change behaviour, at least long term. Shaming just serves to make people feel lousy, and it doesn't improve our downtown. What about the opposite, though? Motivation. How do we motivate people to care? The trillion dollar question for civic engagement. For everything from voter turnout to sitting on civic committees, civic engagement *can* give people a rounded perspective and help to prevent the monocausal assessments that prevent us from taking a deep dive into the search for improvements.
I feel that as long as people aren't engaged / are apathetic / overwhelmed, it's way harder for our politicians to do their jobs. (And I don't mean keyboard warrior engaged, I mean showing up in person engaged.) And that in turn makes it harder for all of these "ifs" that you posted about. IF people were generally more engaged, we might get wider sidewalks, more greenspace, cleaner downtown, better lighting, etc etc.
Honestly as a big Birch and Boar supporter and as a person who actually truly loves our downtown, their business started to change a lot in the last little while and stoped being a draw for me. Huge price increases (which I can understand, because my food bills at home are going up big time too), but also way less of the local meat and other home cooking things that I loved. The last time I went in I bought nothing and I had planned on buying sausages for dinner. I'm sorry to hear of all their challenges and I also think they messed up their re-brand.