For some small businesses in Plymouth, tomorrow is the most important day of the year.
“Saturday [after Thanksgiving] is like our Christmas,” Pam Smith told the Select Board earlier this month. “It’s our busiest day of the entire year.”
Smith, co-owner of Locally Yours, a retail shop selling cozy hometown apparel, gifts, and home décor, has stores in Village Landing and Manomet. She was among several small business owners welcoming the Select Board’s resolution declaring Small Business Saturday.
While symbolic, “it was an opportunity to highlight the great work that small businesses do and the tremendous contribution that they make to the local economy,” said Select Board member David Golden, sponsor of the resolution. “I hope we see people out in droves in our commercial areas.”
It is the first time that Plymouth has made such a declaration, which has long been promoted by a nationwide organization called the Small Business Coalition. The initiative is co-sponsored by American Express and the Small Business Administration.
“It’s really a reminder for folks to get down to downtown and their small villages and visit their small business owners,” said Stephen Cole, executive director of the Plymouth Foundation.
Cole said 80 percent of jobs in Plymouth are created by businesses with fewer than 20 employees, and 52 percent are at businesses with fewer than five employees.
Downtown, Cole said, is thriving. He cited a three percent storefront vacancy rate by square footage on Court, Main, and Water streets, based on a door-to-door survey he and an intern conducted in August.
But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t some empty high-profile storefronts. One is at the former Eastern Bank building, owned by developer Rick Vayo.
“We’ve interviewed many tenants for there, but to me, that has to be a retail space,” Vayo said. “We’ve said no to many tenants that have looked to go there, because I would rather see it empty than not [be] an integral part of the retail scene.”
Vayo said downtown has come a long way in the last decade, especially with the opening if more restaurants, but he added that the area still needs more stores to improve the mix of businesses.
Vayo, who owns Plimoth General Store, on Main Street, is also about to begin construction of a boutique hotel on Chilton Street that he hopes will open a year from now and bring more business to downtown stores and restaurants.
Vayo sees value in an initiative such as Small Business Saturday.
“People are too busy to focus in on shopping small business all the time, but when they’re reminded that there’s a lot of small business in their neighborhood that can fulfill all the needs they have and are their neighbors, their friends, maybe family and are right around the corner, I think people do rally,” he said.
Cole hopes to attract more customers to downtown next spring, when the Plymouth Foundation plans to open a co-working space that could host as many as 100 young professionals. That would mean more customers at local restaurants and bars for lunch and after-work drinks, he said.
“It might be an incentive for some places to open up for lunch or even open up at all on Mondays and Tuesdays,” he said. Those two days are by far the quietest in the business district.
Plymouth has become a regional restaurant destination in recent years, but Vayo supports the opening of even more restaurants with bars. But there’s a caveat.
“On the other hand, if we’re talking about bars that strictly function as bars [and] attract a much younger crowd, that’s a rowdy crowd,” he said. “There are bars in downtown that should not be there anymore.”
Vayo said one reason he bought T-Bones Roadhouse building on Main Street was to prevent another bar like it from opening there.
A frequent complaint about downtown is that there is not enough parking. Vayo disagrees.
“We don’t really have a parking problem,” he said. “I think people find a space.”
If people have to walk a bit, he said, that’s part of the downtown experience. He added that businesses could do more to encourage employees not to park out front of their workplace. He would like to see signs indicating how many minutes it takes to walk to various attractions other places.
“When you tell someone it’s a quarter mile down the road, that’s not that far, but some people look at a quarter mile as you might as well tell them it’s the top of Mount Everest,” he said. “If you tell them it’s a four-minute walk, it’s all of a sudden no big deal.”
Fred Thys can be reached at fred@plymouthindependent.org.