When I was in high school, I lived in Guthrie Center, Iowa. It was small and rural. Guthrie County had about 12,000 people. Guthrie Center had less than 2,000. I worked in the local menswear store, Hughes Menswear. It was a good job. It had me downtown where there were lots of opportunities to interact with friends. Darwin and Sheryl Hughes taught me a lot about life, business, and community.

I grew up thinking that was an ordinary little situation. It wasn’t. A decade or so later, as an outreach economist at Iowa State University, I worked with Professor Kenneth Stone, who initiated the university’s retail trade analysis program. I learned that virtually no rural town of less than 10,000 people managed to maintain a full-line menswear store. Darwin and Sheryl probably didn’t realize it, but Hughes Menswear was a point of discussion among the retail trade analysis set. They seemed to be doing the impossible.

The store has been gone for over a decade now. Darwin and Sheryl maintained it for over 40 years, but in the end the store was closed. They couldn’t sell it. While I am certain potential buyers were impressed with the miracle they had maintained for 40 years, those buyers were also aware that it was really their own personal miracle. No one had the confidence they could replicate that success in a declining rural town that, by all rights, shouldn’t have been able to support the store in the first place.

That is why business communities – whether they are rural main streets or urban boutique neighborhoods – need to grow. Had Guthrie Center been growing, had its business community been expanding its reach, Darwin and Sheryl might have found a buyer for that store. If they had had confidence they could sell the store, they could have continued investing in it, improving it, and expected the continued investment to come back to them. That continued investment would have also been an asset to other business owners in downtown Guthrie Center. It would have made the entire area more attractive and valuable. That would have helped the business community continue to grow and expand its reach. Growth begets a virtuous cycle.

But that was not in the cards. Guthrie Center didn’t grow. The business community did not expand its reach. Darwin and Sheryl were probably under no illusions that the store could not be sold. At some point, I am certain they went into maintenance mode – doing what was absolutely necessary but taking everything possible out of the business. The business was their primary retirement asset. If it couldn’t be sold, it had to be stripped. They weren’t alone. One by one, nearly all the businesses that populated downtown when I was in school have been stripped and closed. Just as growth begets a virtuous cycle, decline begets a dismal one.

As an outreach economist, I often found myself making presentations to groups in rural Iowa towns. It was not unusual for someone to ask why growth was necessary. After all, they had lived there all their lives, and it was just the way they liked it. I invariably recounted the story of Hughes Menswear. 

Nothing is so certain as change. Get on board with the sort of change you want. Cooperate, investigate, and make it happen.