The Hamptons are feeling empty

Economically, I’m beginning to get a sense of what it must have felt like for the original East Enders who worked hard and saved up big piles of wampum only to see everything change when those tall masts appeared on the horizon.

Now, it seems, everything is changing just about as fast. Venerable stores like the Hamptons’ Long Island Sound are perishing at the hand of the Internet revolution. Death by download. Newspapers, of all bedrock institutions, are locked in the same desperate digital struggle. Restaurants have been ravished by the recession, with 43 percent of diners recently telling Zagat that they’re eating out less, 36 percent saying they’re ordering cheaper and 22 percent saying they’re skipping appetizers and/or dessert. On the other hand, Scotts Miracle-Gro has announced record sales for 2009, so maybe people are creating their own salads again.

Now yet another trend is causing concern out east: nomad merchants.
“We’re kind of following our customers,” Stephanie Goureau recently told The East Hampton Star. “As we close East Hampton we’re opening up Palm Beach.”

Goureau was speaking of her family’s women’s fashion store, Courage. b, which opened on East Hampton’s Main Street in June and has now closed to concentrate on more populous locations. Back in June she told The Star, “We’re not sure what’s going to happen. Right now it’s sort of up in the air, but we’d love to see what the results are and create some sort of permanent presence there.”

Or maybe not.

The Star included Courage. b in a story about the pop-up shop phenomenon – stores that pop up for the season and then vanish as the crowds do. Already gone along with Courage. b are Intermix, Hermes and Jill Stuart, and some others, like Brooks Brothers and Gucci, were expected to “follow suit in the pop-up, pop-down phenomenon.”

Nomadic life apparently makes sense for some merchants in the recession era, when landlords are hungry for tenants, even fleeting ones. But it represents a fundamental shift in our traditional understanding of a shop if, instead of a steady presence in our midst, it’s only as solid as a piece of paper, and a short-term one at that.

Then there’s the impact of all those empty storefronts on year-round residents. “It concerns me, honestly,” Judi Desiderio of Town and Country Real Estate told The Star. “Last winter was eye-popping, with the amount of vacancies we had, then the seasonal leases kind of stuck their finger in the dam.” The reporter, Kate Maier, possibly tipped her feelings about the phenomenon by writing that those stores popped up “like weeds” this spring.

It’s also a paradigm shift that some corporate stores, although seen as having less emotional attachment to village life, might be the ones that stick around.
Marina Van, director of the East Hampton Chamber of Commerce, told The East Hampton Press that the big-name shops can be good for the village because they have the backing to survive the dark months. “So when people staying at the hotels call the chamber to ask which stores are open, I have something to tell them,” she said. Among them, Tommy Hilfiger, which debuted this spring, J. Crew and the Hamptons’ five Ralph Lauren shops are expected to keep the lights on this winter.

It’s not enough, some feel. “I don’t know what the answer is,” former village merchant Ronald Eisenberg told The Press. “But I can tell you that business is declining so badly in East Hampton because landlords are dealing with pop-up stores like Hermes and Michael Kors.” He feels that the annual pop-up immigration inflates rents across the board, aggravating the situation.
On yet another hand, it’s fundamental capitalism that opportunities must be pounced upon. “I can’t say that we planned on going from one store to five in the last six months,” Goureau told The Star back in June, but those recessionary rents virtually compelled them.

What’s the long-term impact? While the ground’s still shifting in the midst of all this economic evolution it’s hard to say. But for East Enders it definitely feels like something important is being lost when shops simply pack up and leave town to follow the caribou consumers.

Long Island Business News / November 11, 2009