Relocations Continue With Mixed Results

Rumors have been floating around town that Best Buy and/or Food Fresh are coming to Ramona. Patch called the . Executive Director Craig Jung first said he was “sworn to secrecy” but then was willing to say, “It’s not either of those.”

Jung then said the empty former Foodland store would have a new tenant soon. He wouldn’t say how soon, indicating it “depended on how much TI [tenant improvement] has to be done.” The property has been vacant for two weeks.

In a December 2010 column, Patch noted that lot of businesses were moving out of their locations in Ramona into other commercial properties in town that offer cheaper leases. Jung said larger quarters were often a factor as well. He cited Ramona Sports Store and More and Wrangler Dan as examples of well-known businesses that had relocated, saying that Wrangler Dan had moved to larger quarters.

Patch contacted Dan Parker, owner of . The furniture store relocated to Main Street last June after almost five years on Eighth Street.

“For me it was frontage,” Parker said. He said he “took a gamble,” paying more rent in exchange for more foot traffic. So far, the gamble had not paid off. “People just don’t want to spend money,” he said.

Parker said that in the last 12 months more than 50 businesses have closed on Main Street.

Dan Brown, owner of , said that Parker's statistic sounded right to him.

“It’s ugly up here,” said Brown, who has operated his sporting goods business here since 2001. Saying he’d done some work for the 2010 Census, Brown expressed surprise that the town had continued to grow because of all the business closings and empty houses he’d seen.

His store has been at 1530 Main Street since September 2010. He relocated twice during 2010. The first move didn’t work out, he said. He said his rent is half of what it had been at his original location in the Stater Brothers Shopping Center.  

While Brown said that reduced rent had been the  prime motivation for moving,  he also said his current location was “a hair larger” than his original space.

He said business is picking up right now because “it’s a busier time of the year for us. Baseball and Soccer are starting up at the high schools.”

But overall, “we’re off quite a bit from where we were. Our last good year was 2006.” But with what he saw going on with other businesses, Brown said he felt “fortunate we’re just able to be here.” He also noted that lower enrollment in the schools affects his business.

"That’s not good for sporting goods,” he said.

He had a couple of theories. “The town has always run off construction and real estate,” said Brown, so with those industries in a slump, people are not spending.

“Sporting goods aren’t a necessity,” he said.

Brown also recalled that “in the last 10 years we’ve had two major fires up here and a lot of houses have not been rebuilt."

He said he personally knows of people who were just starting to rebuild, or who had moved away altogether.

Brown moved to Ramona in the late 1990s. He had worked in retail management, but had a goal of owning his own business.

“It’s very rewarding," he said. "It’s something I truly enjoy when the times are good.”