CLOSE, BUT NO CIGAR: DOWNTOWN MERCHANTS AND CAPTIVE/DAYTIME MARKETS

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The Problem. Downtown economic development 101 long has taught that one of the strongest competitive advantages of downtowns is their multi-functionality, which leads to a number of “captive” daytime market segments, and stimulates multi-purpose and multi-destination downtown trips. These market segments –e.g., workers, students, hotel guests, etc., — are coming to the downtown continually, so merchants do not have to do anything to attract them to their commercial district. It also has long been thought that the merchants could then just …

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Update on the Reassessment of Our Use of Social Media

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I am now on LinkedIn and, as I suspected, I can see its utility and regret not having signed up before. But, it takes quite a bit of time to figure out what your profile should look like and then make it so. Next on my agenda is to figure out which groups to join and how my participation in them can benefit DANTH,Inc and still be fun for me.

Ben Burgess, of the NorthStar Group in Annapolis, MD, is leading us through our reassessment …

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DANTH Is Reassessing Its Use of Social Media

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The Downtown Curmudgeon works for DANTH, Inc and since I recently have been arguing that downtown small business operators need to learn how to use and benefit from the “social media,” it seemed appropriate that we should take another look at Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube , etc. Other small business operators might be interested in our experience, so I plan on doing a few postings on it.We also will assess moving this blog from blogspot and integrating it into our website, www.ndavidmilder.com. I …

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Office Development — We now have all the office space we need

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For several years now, I have been arguing that a New Normal has emerged for our downtowns and that the business operators, landlords, developers and district leaders who do not recognize that they must adapt to that fact are likely to face severe economic losses. My recently reported research on multichannel retailing (see my last blog posting below) combined with some some recent news items about movie attendance, housing and office development have strongly confirmed my argument.  This posting …

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Downtown Multichannel Retailing

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DANTH, Inc. has just released a research paper I wrote on downtown multichannel retailing.  I prefer to think of it as backdoor retailing, with electronic and non-electronic variations. In any case, the topic is important because downtown retailing is undergoing an enormous change — one that will not be reversed even when the economy recovers from our Great Recession — towards multichannel/backdoor retailing. Downtown merchants and leaders who do not adapt to this new paradigm will be left behind, more dross …

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