For the post of Flake Girl, the opportunity would go to whoever looked best in spandex pants. Auditions are on Tuesday.

My guess is you’re in with a chance.

Annie – I’ll fight you to be Flake Girl. It sounds like a fun position and Flake Girl shouldn’t just automatically go to a girl. That would be gender discrimination :)

I couldn’t finish it. My guess is they made a wise choice. If there is no foot traffic by your store, people aren’t going to come running. I wouldn’t want to turn my business into a ice cream cart. You could throw coupons and bring in clowns for the kids, but none of it would probably work.

I would suggest turning the ice cream shop into a coffee shop or if you love ice cream so much then move to a new location where people want to come and hang out.

Sorry to be such a downer, but it’s going to cost money to get people to talk about your ice cream, some crazy flavor that Ben and Jerry haven’t invented or some great band that families want to see every Tuesday. It’s about cutting your losses before you get too deep.

How’s this for a simple(?) solution.

Use the cart to sell the ice cream to the construction workers who are a there in abundance offering special (junior!!) deals to the vertically challenged worker who totally confused me by not being a “regular” sized guy working in a hole, especially when he walked away

However, when it comes to actual, viable ideas, here is my contribution.

You mentioned that the new cruise night was too far for kids to walk. And the cruise night was drawing more people than just the cruisers, so there was an audience.

Why not make your own “Cruise Night” for kids? If they can close the street like they once did, or otherwise just use the parking lot of the Ice Cream place, have a weekly “Cruise Night” where kids can bring remote controlled cars, bicycles, big-wheels, etc, and show how they are tricked out, have races, etc.

Plus, if there is a bicycle shop or maybe a hobby shop in town, have them co-sponsor it and help foot the bill for advertising the event.

Give people a reason to come back and hang out, and the cie cream shall flow!

Thanks for trying. The blog is back and fully operational. Remember, it’s never too late to leave a nice comment.

I have been thinking about this a lot. Way too much really and not because of the charity gift or the moment of fame on IttyBiz. Here just off the rust belt I see whole blocks go under every month. Is the economy a factor? Of course. But something else is going on and your ice cream shop story illustrates it very well. Your story also illustrates that given the climate there was no way in Houston to save those shops. Why? Here’s my theory:

1) someone mentioned all the eggs were in one basket; as in the whole block not just the ice cream shop counted on the Tuesday deal to resuscitate their ongoing flagging bottom line. Sounds like black Friday in November in the US doesn’t it. And I wholeheartedly agree but that alone did not do in the shops it was a symptom of a bigger problem.

2) someone else mentioned that those shops counted on an event they had no control over. Those business people gave up the opportunity to control their destiny so they could blame someone else for the demise? In a manner of speaking yes. Again, I agree this was an issue but still a symptom of a bigger problem.

3) one of the things I see that has not been mentioned is there was a pandemic of sorts but everybody looked out for their own interests and hunkered down not to win but to avoid losing (forget who coined that)? Now we’re starting to get close to the problem.

4) the death stroke I think leaked out in your editorial remark about the “self important cafe” and its “9 sullen employees.” Employee attitude is a reflection of the owner’s or manager’s, that’s the bottom line. It appears (because I don’t live there or know any of these businesses or their owner/managers) that the block became infiltrated with business heads who a) don’t play well with others and b) preferred being right (broad application) over saving the business district. And likely that was compounded by a measure of seeing/whining about the unfairness of the problem rather than the possibilities. Now we’re getting really hot. (not that kind of hot)

Summary: While there may have been some businesses that survived and interviewing those owner/managers might give insight to how they did it, I don’t think it could have been possible to save the ice cream shop or any of the other shops that went under without a total personality and attitude correction for the entire district. And that’s what I think it would have taken to save the shop and the district.