Linda and I went out driving on the west side of Bend this morning. As someone who went to COCC over 30 years ago, I'm astounded by the new businesses on College Way. All the businesses in areas that I've always pretty much thought of as residential. Everytime I drive around Bend, I'm astounded.

Either I'm wrong, or these businesses are. This is a really good place to point out that sometimes I'm just expressing my puzzlement. I just don't get how these businesses succeed. I don't wish them bad luck, I don't even assume that they aren't succeeding, I just.....don't.....get.....it.

As much as I grumble about the rent downtown, I can at least see some reasons for it. People do come downtown to shop, they do walk around. But I see some fancy high-end shop a half a block off College Way and I'm completely stumped. How many people do they get in every day?

When we had a store in the Mountain View Mall, the rents were quite a bit higher than downtown. But it didn't take long before I realized that if I was to ever start a shop from scratch, I would open in a mall. People find you there. (Doesn't matter how many people tell you that they don't like malls, that they prefer downtown.) Despite my being downtown for over three times as long as I was in the mall, I'd still be willing to bet that more people found us there than have ever found us downtown. I figure that just about everyone who came to town checked out the malls, probably from one end to the other. Not everyone checks out downtown, and almost no one checks out every street.

The malls failed. Not exactly sure why; it could very well have been the high rents. All the financial shenanigans; or just the change in retail 'fad' from enclosed shopping malls, to open shopping malls, to Big Box Centers. (Give it another few years, and we'll go full circle back to downtown department stores.....) But as difficult succeeding in the malls was, at least there was a CHANCE to get people in the door. My wife's bookstore, THE BOOKMARK, is located on the BUSIEST corner in all of Bend, the intersection of 3rd and Greenwood, where Highway 20 intersects with Highway 97. And yet, after 3 years, we still have plenty of people who don't know we're there; plenty of people who come in for the first time after 3 years, and it's clear they still think of us as a new store.

If you have a store that isn't on a main street, isn't in a walking area, isn't in a shopping center, how many visitors do you get? Some of these are nice looking stores, obviously well-loved by the owners. Still, how many customers do they have? I have a huge backlog of customers, anyone who has come in my store over the past 26 years even once is a potential customer. Anyone checking out downtown. All my regulars. And I'll still have extremely slow days, when hardly anyone comes in. I can't imagine what it must be like on some of these out of the way stores.

I've come to the conclusion, especially after observing most stores close before they ever hit the 10 year mark, that almost all small businesses fail. Is it all just money churning through the system? Is it all equity money from somewhere else being dissipated? That is what it looks like to me.

That can't be right, can it?