Customers stock Willow Glen store with hope
Three months ago, if you’d told Natalie Thompson that she’d be sitting amid the soft scent of soap and fancy candles at Fleurish, her Willow Glen gift shop, talking about how blessed she was, she would have said you were nuts.
Three months ago, Thompson’s shop was on the casualty list, along with so many small businesses done in by the Great Recession. She was preparing to call it quits. She sent a notice to the neighborhood e-mail list.
After nearly eight years, she wrote, Fleurish was hanging it up within a month or so. The note described what had been a great run. And it suggested customers cash in their gift certificates and pick up their layaway items. —‰’09 wasn’t good to very many of us,” she explained to me recently.
Thompson had gone from being on the ropes to being on the mat. She’d had a year of personal financial setbacks — her car engine blew, a portion of the floor in her 70-year-old house rotted and collapsed, her irrigation system sprang a leak, her water heater went, then the washer and dryer. On top of all that, a loan she’d hoped for fell through. As a single woman and a sole proprietor, she had to rely on the store’s reserves to cope.
The reserves and the store’s inventory dwindled. Slow sales slowed further.
