by Teri Carnicelli

Many merchants along the light rail construction route in Phoenix have anxiously awaited the holiday shopping months of November and December to see whether business will, at last, pick up—or take the final plunge into oblivion. 

One of the biggest challenges faced by business owners in the east strip center south of Camelback Road is that parking for their customers is directly in front of their businesses—meaning that customers sometimes need to back out into the one lane of oncoming traffic heading north. Before light rail construction began, there were three open lanes heading north, allowing drivers to move over if necessary. Now, business owners say customers fear the traffic situation, and have stopped coming to their businesses altogether (submitted photo).

    Abrams is referring to several marketing and promotion initiatives the city has rolled out since August, in an attempt to aid businesses along the entire Phoenix segment of the light rail—a 20-mile route that runs from 19th Avenue and Bethany Home Road to the Phoenix/Tempe border at Washington Street. Programs have included customized postcard mailers, promotional T-shirts, radio remotes, a package of 25 business features purchased on Channel 15’s Smart Shopper segment, and the city’s biggest initiative of them all: a web mall for the LRT merchants.

    However, Abrams says that many of the small mom-and-pop style businesses in the North Central Phoenix portion of the light rail route have no use for a Web site to sell their products and/or services, as most of their customers prefer to buy in person—or are not very Internet savvy.

    They also have found little success with the other promotional outlets available from the city. For example, 100 businesses have signed up to use the postcards, and more than 50 have used them so far, but many of those business owners did receive some back due to bad addresses. Overall, some found the postcards to be successful when advertising “invitation only” private sales or discounts, but the more general mailings got little to no response, according to some of the business owners who used them.

    This was one of several complaints and concerns raised by LRT merchants at a Nov. 8 meeting hosted by BOMARC at the George & Dragon pub. Merchants stated that they had neither seen nor received the “Shop the Line” T-shirts that the city was supposedly producing for them to use as giveaways and for employees to wear. They also had seen few of the billboards and banners that the city was supposed to be purchasing to highlight the retail area.

    While city officials were able to show that 27 radio remotes at LRT businesses had take place since Sept. 16, the majority of those were with the radio station KVIB, which caters primarily to a young, Latino market. Many BOMARC members believe this is not the target market for businesses along the rail.

    Finally, they felt the city’s emphasis on the Web site, www.shoptheline.net, failed to meet the needs of several smaller businesses whose sales continue to drop off as the end of the year approaches.

Shop online–or not?

The city has a special program that offers free assistance to businesses to create their retail space for the Shop the Line Web site. Services include helping to upload products, installation of merchant tools (Paypal, etc.) and providing technical support.

“It’s a free resource,” says Albert Santana of the City Manager’s office, who is assigned to the light rail project. “We’re trying to offer as many options as we can. They (the merchants) can use them or not; they can choose what works best for them.”

The city also plans to incentive shoppers to the Web site by offering the chance to win a “big” prize, but what that will be hasn’t been decided yet.

From Sept. 25 through Oct. 31, the Web site had 152,000 site visits, with 152

businesses online and 11 businesses’ Web pages in progress. However, only five businesses total are set up for selling products online. Those LRT merchants who haven’t yet taken advantage of this free program should contact Santana at 602-321-0302 or Albert.Santana@phoenix.gov.

The city has coordinated an incentive to businesses that begin to sell their products and services online: Friends of Transit will purchase a $100 gift certificate from them, to be used for additional promotions.

Still, even with the free assistance and the added incentive, many businesses have hesitated to pursue a Shop the Line Web page, unsure of how this could benefit their bottom line.

“It’s a paradigm shift for many business owners who aren’t used to this kind of marketing,” says Gary LeBlanc, president of AmeriSchools, which has been at 1333 W. Camelback Road for nine years. “When we knew light rail was coming, we took every opportunity to meet with the city and plan.”

One of LeBlanc’s own marketing initiatives was to revamp the school’s Web site. But LeBlanc points out that he’s seen little to no demonstrable effect from the Shop the Line Web site. He adds that he has had success with local newspaper advertising, and participating in a charter school showcase at Chris-Town Spectrum mall earlier this year.

Sink or swim

    Many businesses have resorted to funding their own promotions and advertising, despite the fact that their financial cupboards have been mostly bare for months.

“Our retail business is basically dead, and our wholesale business is down more than 30 percent,” says Peter Netzband of Langert Netzband Jewelers, 1526 W. Camelback Road. “We’ve heard from customers that it’s too complicated to get in and out of the strip center—the signage is confusing or not visible enough. If we don’t see some improvement by the end of the year, I’ll probably go on a very long vacation.”

    The city has already take steps to improve signage issues, purchasing taller A-frame signs for better visibility, as well as business access signs that also list the businesses in that center.

    Signs won’t help, some merchants say, unless you can get the shoppers to come to the area in the first place. One small business owner compared the light rail construction route to a travel agent trying to sell vacation packages to Iraq: now matter how cheap or even free the hotel or airfare is, no one wants to go there.

However, there does seem to be some hope on the horizon, as the section along Camelback from Central to just west of 16th avenue is nearly complete and traffic is all but back to normal. Of course, getting that word out to shoppers who have avoided the area for more than a year is another matter.

    The city has pledged to continue exploring future promotion ideas like co-sponsoring radio remotes at larger events, such as ballgames and concerts; purchasing additional billboard spaces outside of the light rail route itself; and buying ads in local newspapers. One suggestion made at the Nov. 8 meeting that city staff promised to look into is purchasing plastic shopping bags with the “Shop the Line” message that can be given to merchants as well as area grocery stores, at no cost to them.

    But if or when those additional promotions, combined with those already in place, will be enough to save some of the already floundering LRT merchants remains to be seen. And that answer may come as soon as the end of the year, making for a not-so-happy holiday season for some.