Final week I noticed the unhappy information that one among my favourite outlets was closing after 22 years in enterprise. Lulu’s Cuts and Toys, which offered kids’s toys and haircuts, was a mainstay in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. I haven’t got children of my very own, however Lulu’s has all the time been a go-to for my nieces and nephews’ birthdays and last-minute child meals finds. The place was full of sentimental, shocking issues – a comfy haven for distinctive and nostalgic finds: cute veggie t-shirts, traditional noise pads, rainbow-colored stretchy rubber ramen noodles, varied Harry Potter wands, and so on.
The corporate introduced its closing with a observe taped to the window (and its digital counterpart, an Instagram submit), signed by proprietor Brigitte Prat and her daughter Lulu, the shop’s namesake. It learn partly:
As a single mom and first-generation American, this group isn’t solely the place I planted the roots of my enterprise, however it’s the place I raised my daughter. With the continued progress of massive field on-line buying (Amazon, and so on.), sadly it’s not possible to maintain our small enterprise thriving with a storefront.
We hope this serves as a reminder to help small companies in the neighborhood. Their merchandise could also be $1 or $2 greater than Amazon’s (however typically cheaper!), and in return you get personalised customer support, extra native companies, extra income circulating throughout the group (and from the fingers of multi-billionaires), a buying expertise that is higher for the atmosphere and a neighborhood that looks like a neighborhood quite than a shopping center.