Tom Saari

Well the DMG wrote a story on how FNBH failed, and Houghton will try something similar on it’s own. Why would downtown business in Houghton stay attached to a failed business plan? They either aren’t making a profit in comfortable business hours or they might be greedy.

“In surveying the Houghton businesses involved, Krug found all but one still want to participate.” I smell a QC, hey your plan is dumb, I won’t join.

This is how terrible whoever runs this this is, “Members batted around different ideas for the names, including “Downtown After Hours,” “Friday After Hours In Downtown Houghton,” and the hopefully facetious “Downtown Houghton Is Open Until At Least Eight O’clock Friday Nights.”

Adam Yeoman from Rhythm suggested coming up with something that summed up the event simply.

“A quirky name isn’t going to work as much as a direct name,” he said. ”

This group of people thinks the name is what is the problem?? LOL They are on crack if they think a name will change buyers behaviors. My business was losing 10k a month, so I changed the name and NOW I AM RICH…

I will give you the some reason why the Houghton and Hancock downtown are failing, it is simple.

One huge factor, people ignore when they push local business, is the average household income in the area. Before online commerce and the huge chains people had to buy local. There 25k Adjusted Gross Income bought X amount of goods and services. Now with super chains stores and online high volume low markup websites 25k buys them say X+ 20% more. There standard of living on the same salary has gone up. To ask people to spend a little more from a small retailer is like asking them to give up there vacation they now could save up for, or the extra car in there driveway. People will rarely if ever lower there standard of living to help out others. Now this is for people who were stretched thin, but this is a lot of people in our immediate area. If you have disposable income, you have health care and full coverage auto insurance, and spending 20% more on items locally won’t affect your standard of living, go ahead blow out your bank accounts and spend that money.

Everytime someone does a study, they count all the cars that go by and say look, this is how many people that could be potential customers, WRONG. The one thing that makes Houghton/Hancock unique is a major highway with a lot of commuter traffic running through both downtowns. This traffic is commuting to or from work, and most likely will not stop. Quantity over quality of traffic, this is way they will always fail, they start with wrong numbers. 2+2=?. No one likes crossing the street when there is are a lot of commuters blasting to and from work.

Even if Walmart is packed, they still have room in there parking lot. One bad experience of not finding a spot, circling the block a few times, finally finding a place, then having to wait 10 minutes for traffic to clear to leave. MEH, I’ll go to Walmart Thank You.

Not to mention all the people in our area against Industry and Tourism. We don’t need any more good paying jobs… Snowmobile, sure they bring in some $$$, but not in my back yard.