Stores, says Jack Gammon, are a lot like people.
“They were born, they age, they flower, and they die,” says Gammon, the manager who presided over the closing of the M.E. Moses store in Hillside Village – the last dime store in East Dallas and Lakewood.
“That’s the marketplace for you.”
It was the marketplace, company officials says, that dictated Store No. 17’s death at the end of April. Small variety stores such as M.E. Moses are an anachronism in these days of Wal-Mart, Hypermart and Price Club, where bigger is cheaper, and people don’t feel like they are getting a bargain unless they buy a gross of something.
If these mega-stores can drive Sears, one of the world’s largest corporations, to the brink of extinction, it’s hardly surprising they are forcing M.E. Moses officials to close Store No. 17.
In fact, what may be more surprising is that Store No. 17 held out as long as it did, and that company officials tried as hard as they did to keep it open.
The dozen or so M.E. Moses stores remaining in the Dallas area often seem as outdated as the merchandise they carry: house dresses, lace paper doilies and those rubber beach thongs that everyone seemed to wear as kids (before shoes for 8-year-olds became socio-political manifestos).
At one time, though, such stores were the pride of the retail business. When Store No. 17 opened in the mid-‘70s, dime stores were still state-of-the-art.
“And the variety store still is,” says Robert Singleton, the supervisor of variety stores for M.E. Moses, who has been with the company for three decades.
“But now variety stores are called Wal-Mart and Kmart, and even grocery stores carry the general merchandise we carry. That’s made it hard to stay in business.”
But there was nothing state-of-the-art about Store No. 17 one day last month. Someone had scrawled “25 percent off lowest marked price” with a felt-tip pen on a dozen or so pieces of cardboard, and the signs were taped to counters, doors, windows and displays. A couple of ladders were propped up against the east and west walls.
The remaining merchandise – mostly odds and ends and notions and sundries – was tossed among the displays as if a strong wind had picked it up and blown it around.
Someone had hung six or eight hula hoops over a door marked “Employees only” in the back of the store. Another handwritten sign advertised something called “Cowboys Cubes” as being marked down from $19.95 to $9.95.
The middle-aged woman at the only open checkout stand bit her lip a couple of times when asked about the store’s closing.
“You have to give the customer what he wants,” says Gammon, a 13-year-veteran of the M.E. Moses operation who moved to Store No. 17 at the end of March, when the previous manager was transferred to another store.
“That’s how you rejuvenate something. You give the customer what he wants, and you give the stockholders what they want, and you give the company what it wants.”
What the customer needs is another matter. Store No. 17 will be replaced with an Amber’s, one of those arts and crafts places that sells dried leaves and Styrofoam balls. Apparently, it doesn’t matter that there is an Amber’s at Casa Linda Plaza, a couple of miles away, and a Michael’s/MJ Designs crafts store only a couple of blocks away.
Coping with change, someone once said, is the secret to success. Things are always going to change, and people had better learn to adjust.
That does not mean, however, that people always like the change.
