Final week, I noticed the unhappy information that one among my favourite outlets was closing its doorways after 22 years of enterprise. Lulu’s Cuts and Toys, which bought youngsters’ toys and haircuts, was a mainstay within the Park Slope neighorhood of Brooklyn. I haven’t got any youngsters of my very own, however Lulu’s was all the time go-to vacation spot for my nieces’ and nephew’s birthdays and last-minute child bathe foraging. The place was full of comfortable, stunning issues — a comfy haven for distinctive and nostalgic discoveries: cute vegetable pun onesies, the traditional whoopie cushion, stretchy rubber rainbow-colored ramen noodles, assorted Harry Potter wizard wands, and so on.

The enterprise introduced its closure with a be aware taped to the window (and its digital counterpart, a submit on Instagram), signed by the proprietor Brigitte Prat, and her daughter Lulu, the shop’s namesake. It learn, partially:

As a single mom and first-generation American, this neighborhood shouldn’t be solely the place I grew my enterprise’s roots, it’s the place I raised my daughter. Given the continued development of big-box on-line buying (Amazon, and so on.), it’s sadly now not viable to maintain our small enterprise thriving with a storefront.

We hope this serves as a reminder to assist small companies locally. Their merchandise could also be $1 or $2 greater than Amazon (however usually, they’re cheaper!), and in alternate, you get personalised customer support, extra native jobs, extra earnings circulating throughout the neighborhood (and out of multi-billionaires’ arms), a buying expertise that’s higher for the surroundings and a neighborhood that looks like a neighborhood and never a company strip mall.