I’m not a sewer. I mean, a person who sews. I know people who are, though, who are quite distressed that JoAnn Fabrics is going out of business. In an effort to console such folk, I indulged in an online search for fabric shops that led to a couple of conclusions. One is that the internet is lousy at clean-up, and the second is that big box stores have ruined the ability to find things, funneling all purchasing to Amazon. Let’s take these one at a time.
If you’ve ever searched for a physical store (fabric or otherwise) online, you know that sites like Yelp are full of artifacts. Stores that closed a long time ago and have never been removed. In fact, when I commuted to New York City I sometimes walked several blocks on my lunchtime, looking for a store only to learn that it had closed five or ten years ago. It still beamed happily on the web, though. I have driven to bookstores that no longer exist, based on their location being proclaimed loudly online. Regarding fabric, I located directories for Enright’s Fabric Warehouse, in nearby Bethlehem. Nothing online indicated that they were long out of business. I street-leveled the address on Google Maps and found a building I’d driven past many times; I’d actually driven by it the day before. It obviously was a large factory-like building, but it hadn’t been a fabric store in the seven years I’ve lived in the Lehigh Valley. This isn’t the only time I’ve searched specifically for a company/store with the query word “bankrupt” or “out of business” to find Hal-9000 saying, “I can’t let you do that, Steve.”
The second point. Big box stories come to town, drive smaller stores out of business, then fold themselves, leaving us all poorer for it. As big boxes go, I liked JoAnn’s. Probably because they were failing, they had lots of things besides fabrics that I could look at on family outings. But the fact is smaller fabric stores (which still appear online as existing) went out of business when JoAnn came to town. There were two JoAnn stores in the Lehigh Valley. Smaller places closed, and now we’ll be running around naked before we can find a fabric store willing to sell. I’ve seen this happen with other industries as well. There was a fine office supply store in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin when I was at Nashotah House. Staples came to town and closed them down. If you’ve been in a Staples lately, you know the writing’s on the wall. I know we’re stuck with big boxes. More often we turn to Amazon where a few keystrokes will get you what you need. Check and mate.