April 21, 2020 — The economic landscape in Mendocino County has changed irrevocably, with businesses divided between essential and non-essential. Reading a book and riding a bike are two time-honored solitary pursuits, but in this time of social isolation, one shop is shuttered and the other is flourishing.
Greta Kanne and her husband have now owned the Book Juggler, where Kanne worked as a teenager, for fifteen years. That’s about half as long as the used and new bookstore has been on a corner of Main street, right downtown in Willits. She said she barely felt the last recession, but things are a lot different now, especially after what she called the one-two punch of the bypass and cannabis legalization.
The Book Juggler is shut down during the shelter in place order, but she is busy interacting with customers on the phone and social media, buying more books and puzzles, and relying on delivery services to sell merchandise. Kanne is also making videos of herself reading some of her favorite storybooks on Facebook. “I hear that a lot of littles out there are actually talking to me while I read the books to them,” she reported. “So that’s pretty cute.” But, “We figure we’re working about three times as hard for about one-third of the revenue,” she added. “It’s pretty devastating. But...it’s a lot better than some of our colleagues who own bars or salons, movie theaters, that kind of thing...which are just completely shuttered.”
And that’s the way it is right now. Some long-time iconic businesses fall on one side of the essential divide, and others on the other. If your only way of getting around Ukiah is on a bicycle, you might consider the twenty-five-year-old Dave’s Bike shop, formerly Draper’s Raleigh Cycles, pretty essential. “We have customers who do solely depend on a bicycle for transportation,” says owner Dave Mensinger. “Some of them are poor and that’s what they can afford. Some of them have got money but they choose not to drive a car. But every day we repair a bicycle for somebody whose only transportation is a bicycle.”
Dave’s is right downtown, too, on Gobbi Street, within sight of the co-op and Safeway. The fence protecting the warehouse is made of sixty-four individual bike rims, and the decorative fence out front is a sturdy, yet whimsical construction of rims and frames. To give the place a sense of permanence, says Mensinger.
A lot of his customers are replacing old bikes or buying new ones, at a rate of five or six times the average, per week. Now, “We are beginning to experience the gap in the supply chain people have been speaking of,” Mensinger notes. Chinese factories were shut down as the pandemic swept the country, and warehouses are emptying out of popular items.
Kanne, as a Willits City Council member with a knack for social media, is strategic about popularity, and civic-minded as well. She’s using her platform to promote a contest, where people can buy a $20 gift certificate to a North County business and use it as a raffle ticket to enter a drawing for an even bigger gift certificate: a $300 shopping spree at Mariposa Market, JD Redhouse, or Spare Time garden supply. “The idea really is to support our small business community,” she explained. “I think it’s hard for all of us to even comprehend the magnitude of this disaster. I know that we are a resilient bunch in this county. We are used to being scrappy and working twice as hard as other places. I think that we can weather this, but we’re all going to need some help.”
Sometimes, the best way to keep it all together is to go for a long bike ride, all by yourself. If he were to leave his shop right now, said Mensinger on a sunny Saturday afternoon, he would head up Low Gap Road, “because that’s the fastest way to get out of town on a dirt road and be almost alone.” To improve his mountain biking skills, he’d hit the trails at Lake Mendocino. But for a cyclist’s equivalent of a scenic stroll, he recommends Talmage to Old River Road out to Hopland.
And it’s ideal exercise in the time of social isolation: “I tell people it’s like riding in Napa. Without the people.”