Retail business and a sense of entitlement

Cleveland Park Strip
Originally uploaded by connave

(Flickr photo of the Cleveland Park Strip by Conn Ave.)

I have been wrestling with various aspects of my job lately, working through nightmares, and having insights in between nightmares.

One is that in a lot of the less competitive commercial districts in the city, business proprietors have a sense of entitlement, that they are owed business.

The reality is that great businesses, destination businesses, attract customers from all over. People want to shop there because of the quality of the offer in terms of service, experience, and value, not even necessarily price.

In the commercial district I work in/on, one of the leaders constantly kvetches about how developers of area projects need to buy local. I agree. But they won't just give contracts for nothing in return--to buy people off, to quieten them... (On the other hand, as projects scale up, it's much harder for small businesses to participate.)

While in Anacostia I popped into the Anacostia Waterfront Business Resource Center, which is set up in part to assist small, local, and disadvantaged businesses in getting contracts, in working as subcontractors on large contracts, and in working to assist businesses to grow to the next level.

Some of the money funding this center comes from the Federal Highway Administration and DDOT, and some of the contractors that have been assisted are now working on DDOT projects.

I realized (between nightmares) that this constant kvetching has created this idea within the psyche of the other businesses that they are owed something. The entitlement culture doesn't work.

The other thing this same person says all the time is that the Brookland commercial district has everything that is present on Connecticut Avenue NW. Now that street has at least 7 business nodes (one is minor, the others major):

-- at the intersection of K Street-Golden Triangle;
-- Dupont Circle;
-- Woodley Park;
-- Cleveland Park;
-- Van Ness;
-- lower Chevy Chase (where Politics & Prose is)
-- Chevy Chase.

I always joke about Main Street principles 9 and 10--officially there are 8 principles.

#9 is being truthful and direct about your assets, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

#10 is making hard choices.

We're failing on both.

These two meta problems, the sense of entitlement and the failure of both business proprietors and customers (especially neighborhood-based residents) make revitalization of smaller commercial districts in the city almost impossible. (Or maybe I am just very impatient.)

Not Garden District, but a similar kind of land opportunity.


Garden District side yard