Over the past few months, those of us who run
brick-and-mortar fiber arts stores in Michigan -- the small ones, not the big-box kind –
have watched helplessly while yet more small shops decide to close their
doors. Most recently, my good friends in
Ann Arbor at Knit-A-Round have announced a late spring closure. Before that, it was a shop in downtown
Detroit, Howell, Dearborn, and so on.
Some things need to be said here. Making it through the recession has been a
trick, no doubt about it. And to some
extent, the fiber arts industry has suffered with every other industry in
America, with the exception of fat-cat investment bankers. But that’s not the only cause for concern. When hard times hit, a lot of people
down-scaled – that is, they went from their local yarn store to big-box or
on-line sources because it was cheaper.
More and more, people get patterns from on-line chat rooms. More and more, the brick-and-mortar
operations find themselves decimated by on-line retailers, by half-price
coupons at the big-box stores (so that yarn regularly priced at 5 bucks becomes
2.50 – and why should those mega-companies care? They get
yarn of at least marginally acceptable quality from places where workers
receive almost nothing and still make a profit). There are a couple of large on-line yarn
purveyors that manufacture yarn in places like South America and China, where
both materials and labor are cheaper than cheap. The dyes used are often suspect. Workers are basically used up and thrown away. But still – it’s cheap, and it’s been a hard
economic time in America.
I don’t think there is much that can be done about the
on-line pattern purveyors, even though a lot of the so-called designers are no
such thing and write disastrously awful patterns. I see them all the tme; people buy yarn, then
come into the shop gnashing teeth over an idiotic pattern “free” from some
website. But many of the patterns are
decent. When knitters and crocheters go
to company sites, to PatternFish, to Etsy stores, or to Knitty, the results can
be satisfactory. Shops can’t carry every
pattern that can be secured on line. And
books are expensive. I have not been
able to persuade people very often that a really good knitting or crochet book is worth
every dime, because it’s usually NOT just a collection of patterns. The best books are COURSES – a class between
covers – or a collection of stitches or techniques that can vastly expand your
capabilities and repertoire. A
downloaded book is a pretty pathetic thing.
The paper doesn’t last; you have pages flying around; it’s not the
equivalent of a lovely binding and glossy pages.
But I’m prepared to give up on the patterns (if I could only
persuade people to check with me as to whether the pattern is decent before they
spend money on yarn). I might even get a
computer set up in the shop so that people can show me what they have found
-- to prevent disaster.
What I am NOT prepared to concede is the silly idea that
chat-rooms are somehow equivalent to a brick-and-mortar store. A “friend” on Facebook, a contact on Ravelry,
is not a friend in the face-to-face sense.
These are scarily asocial relationships – that is to say, not physical
or tested in any meaningful way. You
need to have coffee with someone before you can decide whether that person is a
friend. It’s what students at the University
of Michigan apparently do – sitting in their dorm rooms “chatting” by computer
with students in the next dorm room. It's the mistake I made once, when I was much younger: My friend Barbara set me up with a fellow who was serving in Vietnam. We wrote dozens of letters. He was sure he was in love with me. I was sure I was in love with him. Then he came home. Face-to-faceness happened. He didn't like the pimples on my forehead; I didn't like his receding chin, his swagger, his ... everything. We agreed that we were not in love after all after about three hours. Face-to-faceness, which can be unfortunate in its outcomes, is nevertheless REAL. Cyberspace is NOT real.
These are profoundly destructive habits. They make us autistic, incapable of empathy. We forget that it's nice to be hugged -- which can happen in yarn shops. We can't teach one another or debate
important issues or disagree or get into fights in a spontaneous way. So
when people stop coming to brick-and-mortar shops, when they decide that they
can get the equivalent STUFF from websites, I have to say I am horrified. What about those friendships? What about the knitting groups, the
conversations, the laughter? What about
the ideas that spring up like flowers in a garden, every time a group meets? And what ABOUT the yarn? Isn’t it better to feel it? To compare things on shelves where you can
actually see what it’s made of? Where
you can actually swoon over it, or say ICK, before plunking down your
hard-earned money? I have always said that I welcome everything in the shop -- no matter where it was bought. I still do. But I worry more and more about the quantity of yarn I'm seeing made by Peruvian children and Asian slaves (I mean that term literally -- the factories often are basically prisons). Most of it didn't come from small shops.
I haven’t even mentioned the whole business about shopping
locally, which is supposed to be a big deal, in Michigan and everywhere else.
The handwriting is on the wall: The shops will close eventually, one by
one. This is not just a market sorting
itself out. These are low-profit
enterprises. You don’t get to empty the
ice cream machine each night and start over the next day with a fresh
batch. Yarn sits on shelves for
years. If you don’t sell it, you lose
your shirt by selling it at cost. Employees
in yarn shops typically make little more than minimum wage, or work for nothing
(as with Larry and me). Lots of yarn shops
succeed only because somebody, somewhere, has a living wage to fall back on.
So knitters, weavers, crocheters need to decide, sooner or
later, whether the shops are worth keeping.
Artisan Knitworks is actually a (limited) success story: We have survived, at least for now … so this is NOT about my own shop. It is, however, a kind of warning across the
bow. Everywhere, shops are closing. Owners are exhausted. When we talk about it, the exhaustion is pervasive and sometimes unrewarded. It will be up to clients to decide whether they are worth keeping. The decision may be NO. But one way or the other, a decision will
have to be made. I’d like to see empathy
and sociability prevail. But it’s truly
hard to say what will happen over the next year or two. Face-to-faceness is pretty old-fashioned & its survival is uncertain.
svb
