It's funny the things you forget about when you're busy. I was telling a friend about the blogposts I'd been writing - installments about our crewmembers to introduce them to our customers. I told her how much I enjoyed interviewing them and getting to know them that much better. She loved that idea and wanted to know what I wrote about Scott and I. "Oh, I told her, "I hadn't really thought about writing about us". "Well, why not?", she asked. Indeed, why not? So here's our introduction, in case you haven't met us yet, and maybe something new you didn't know about us if you already have.
Actually, I've written and rewritten this three times already. I've discovered why I'd "forgotten" to do a piece on the two of us....it's extraordinarily difficult to write about yourself. I could go on about us - our home, our dog and two cats, our daughter whom we're so proud of - but I'd rather you have pertinent information about us instead. We can get to the other things later.
When we were given the opportunity to buy WFS, our immediate thought was not how we were going to get rich from this store. Of course, we'd like the store to make enough income so that we, and all of our employees, could be comfortable and secure -that goes without saying. But our first thought was how we could use the store as an instrument to help Altadena. In our opinion, success is not just a solitary thing....if we are going to be successful, then Altadena needs to be successful, too.
You've read how we feel about Altadena from our prior postings on the subject. We are Altadena advocates! It's a beautiful town with a population of highly creative people. But people need to understand that as a town, Altadena is languishing. It gets a lot of bad press and the sad thing is that some people believe that bad press is a good thing....it keeps people away and that keeps the town secure. What the bad press actually does is attract a bad element, much the same way the Old West's lawlessness attracted known criminals. We'd like to be instrumental in changing the way Altadena is perceived by others.
The best way to do that is by increasing the revenue the small businesses in Altadena make. The more money they make, the more revenue the County of Los Angeles makes in tax dollars. A lot of people don't know that the amount of tax revenue a town makes is directly correlated to the amount of services it receives. If Altadena is on the lower end of the revenue scale, the easier it is for the Supervisors to ignore us and pass us over for any incentives, programs, etc. Scott and I would like to see a successful, thriving Altadena, where more county funds are freed up for the residents and business owners to partake in. We'd like to see improvement for the North Lake Business District. We'd like to help the district become more pedestrian-friendly - to help make shopping here a more pleasant experience than it is presently.
All these wants are just so much dust in the wind if people don't understand the logic of shopping locally. This is the reason for our advocacy of The 3/50 Project - http://www.the350project.net/home.html - we must educate our people about the dangers of big-box and chain stores. This is the reason that we're concentrating our buying at the store from companies that make their products here in the U.S. and preferably, make them in California. Even better if they make them in Los Angeles or here in Altadena. Scott and I enjoy buying from local artisans and local companies. We like the feeling we get knowing that in some small way we're helping stop the free-fall the U.S. has been on with huge corporations, like WalMart, basing their production in China and other countries. We enjoy bolstering not only our local economy, but the U.S. economy as well.
We hope that you'll attend Sunday's Positivi-TEA and give us a chance to explain our views in person. Come meet us, have some fun and hear what we've got to say....we promise to listen to you, too.
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