Our View: Main Street’s Loss

Today, the ravishing of America’s Main Streets seen in the 1980s and ‘90s seem, like those old fashioned Main Streets themselves, to be a throwback to a different time. It’s become a cliche to see vacant and boarded up buildings, local mom and pop shops driven out of business by malls, big box chains and, more recently, the internet.

And yet, here we are again, watching in real time as consumer habits and economic changes kill another long-standing business on a prominent Main Street.

We learned this week that the Ben Franklin Five and Dime store on Chatham’s Main Street, a staple since at least the 1950s, will be closing this summer. With its eclectic mix of practical merchandise, gifts and crafts supplies, the shop has, admittedly, been somewhat of an anachronism for a couple of decades. But if you needed a vegetable peeler, shoelaces or other such practical items, Ben Franklin’s was a reliable source.

Thanks to the internet, mainly Amazon, as well as big boxchains, the shop’s business has been in a steady downward spiral, according to the current owners. It’s no longer a sustainable model, and could be even less so given our current economic uncertainty and the bizarre tariff policies of the Trump administration. 

 Main Streets in Chatham, Harwich, Orleans and other Cape towns have managed to hold on despite the challenges of recent decades. While the mix of shops and restaurants has fluctuated, there remains just enough there for year-rounders to keep them from becoming tumbleweed towns from January to April. The summer takes care of itself.

 We don’t know yet what will replace the Ben Franklin store. We hope it’s not another T-shirt, souvenir or high-end clothing shop catering to the summer crowd. A practical retail outlet that serves the needs of all residents — year-round and seasonal — like the hardware store across the street, would help maintain Chatham’s Main Street as the vital business district it has always been. We’ve always advocated shopping local, and the demise of the Ben Franklin store is a textbook example of what happens when that doesn’t happen.