Dawahares-What Went Wrong?

Dawahares, a family owned clothing store chain, founded in 1907 by a Syrian immigrant, will close all its stores, the last closing as of September 30th. Of all 33 stores, there were only nine initially to close, but it didn't take long for the family to realize the plan they had worked out in the face of mounting bankruptcy was not sufficient to prevent their total loss of funds by October.

Dawahares founder, who left Syria in order to ecape religious persecution, started out as a worker in a sweat shop in Mew York. At the urgings of a brother-in-law, he moved to Kentucky, ostensiby to work in the mines. Instead, he became a clothing and fabric salesman. Eventually, he opened his first store in Eastern Kentucky, long the most economically depressed area of the state.

Over the years, he opened several other stores in the area, but it was one of his sons who opened the crown jewel of the family business in Lexington, in the 1930's. Dawahares over the years gathered the reputation as the place to go for University of Kentucky Wildcats clothing and paraphernalia. The business continued to grow and prosper, until soon there were stores spread out across Kentucky, as well as West Virginia and Tennessee.

Unfortunately, it became somewhat of a dinosaur and may have been doomed to extinction by adherence to a business plan that was no longer economically feasible, while getting away from its roots at the same time.

Many see Dawahares as a Kentucky tradition. Others-quite a few others, it would seem-see it as a place where you go to pay top dollar (at least from a working class perspective) for second rate (at best) merchandise. In a good economy it might work, although even at that the UK contract may have been the only thing that kept the business profitable over the last thirty years.

In today's economy, a business plan that puts you at a disadvantage against places like Goodwill and other such thrift stores needs to be scrapped. The worse the economy gets, after all, the more those kinds of stores draws in an expanded clentelle, from the poor and working class, on up to the middle class.

When that happens, it is businessess like Dawahares, that never appealed to upper class folks to begin with, that suffer. What middle class folks continue to patronize such a business do so less frequently and spend less when they do. The poor and working class shoppers are now all but out of the picture, and what picture they are in involves old black and white stills.

So, why is this story so important I feel the need to blog about it? Well, it's a good barometer by which to measure the current political as well as economic climate. A bad economy tends to favor Democrats to begin with. When the country has been under a Republican Administration for the last eight years, and a Republican majority Congress for the last twelve out of fourteen years, that is all the more true.

There are other closings of other establishements coming, such as Goody's and a jewelry chain. Times are not good on the homefront. That means the GOP is actually fighting a three front war with most people scared to death they're itching to open a fourth.

I guess some might consider it ironic that this involves practically the one hundredth anniversary of a store chain founded by a Syrian immigrant,one you might consider a religous refugee, forced to close due to an economy battered in no small part by the direct and indirect effects of a war in the Islamic world. Well, that is true, but at the same time, remember, this was a business that started out in one of the poorest sections of rural Kentucky, became an American success story, and even managed to stay profitable and grow throughout the years of the Great Depression.

When I hear politicans tell us that our best years are yet in front of us, forgive my skepticism.