The coolest thing about Haines is not glacier-capped peaks, wilderness kayaking or the hip atmosphere at the Fireweed Restaurant.
It’s a full retail sector owned entirely by residents.
That’s right. Not a chain store in sight, not even a Starbucks. Skagway can’t make such a boast, nor can Juneau, Sitka or Ketchikan. Starbucks has its teeth in Skagway, and on the Railbelt, Safeway operates grocery stores in Seward and Valdez, towns not much bigger than Haines.
Corporate America is extending its reach, but it’s not here yet.
Absence of chain stores isn’t unusual in tiny settlements, but Haines isn’t tiny, at least not by Alaska standards. And, while our grocery stores are dwarfed by ones in Alaska’s largest cities, our town’s range of retail offerings is surprisingly wide.
We can buy guitar strings and cut flowers, board games and clothes, kitchen appliances and sporting goods. A couple years ago I went looking for a beach ball, and found one at Outfitter Sporting Goods. We have three grocery stores and two lumberyards, and a store that sells yarn.
That’s an anomaly for a town this small anywhere, a seeming holdover from Norman Rockwell’s America that begs an explanation.
Obviously, geography plays a role. The box stores in Juneau and Whitehorse, Y.T., are just far enough away to make shopping at them inconvenient, and shipping delays can make Amazon a hassle. Then there’s good, old-fashioned entrepreneurialism: People want to live here, and if it takes several micro-businesses to cadge together an income, some folks are willing to go that mile.
Exclusive local ownership isn’t good. It’s great. Merchandise and groceries aren’t cheap but local ownership means that money you spend here generally stays here, instead of going to some faceless corporation thousands of miles south. Local owners invest in local causes. And the number of local stores mean that even strangers can find some kind of job, and get a toehold in the community.
A story told by the late town historian Lib Hakkinen about Haines during the Great Depression put this phenomenon into fine focus. As Lib told it, times were so tough here during the 1930s, there was only about $9 cash in the entire town. But the $9 kept circulating through each household, and would linger just long enough for each family to buy groceries and then hang on for a few more weeks until the $9 came back around.
Certainly the story’s apocryphal, but it contains at least a germ of truth and makes an important point: In Haines, in an important way, we’re the economy, each of us. We hold the money and we keep it circulating. That makes each of us very important, more important than consumers in bigger cities.
Because of what it does for us, and says about us, maintaining local ownership is an attribute worth protecting. It should be at the top of the list of goals of the recently formed and locally funded Haines Economic Development Committee.
The opening five years ago of the Aspen Hotel – part of a statewide chain owned by a Lower 48 businessman – should inspire a model for maintaining local ownership. At the time the Aspen was built, residents realized the need for more accommodations. The town had recently lost the Thunderbird Motel and tourism officials were fretting a shortage of beds, particularly during winter months.
No single person or party in town quite had the initiative, know-how or capital to pull off construction of a new hotel. That left the field open for out-of-town interests to invest here. What if, at the time the need for lodging became evident, a group of local investors pooled funds and built the hotel the town needed?
Sound far-fetched? Not so. Haines Brewing Company and Mountain Market were launched by corporations that were more like investment cooperatives than anything else. The majority shareholders eventually bought out the investors – mostly their friends – in friendly transactions.
Investment cooperatives work. Keeping such a model in mind might help keep our largest local businesses in local hands. And that effort would keep money circulating, and reinvesting, in Haines.