‘Small’ town living

Greeley is such an odd place to live in. On one hand it's a (relatively) small town, at least for Northern Colorado and the front range (although it's difficult for me to call anyplace with a popullation of 84,000 small). Much smaller than Fort Collins or Longmont and somewhat smaller than Loveland. We are also east of the I-25 corridor which seems to isolate us a bit. Fort Collins is fairly tech savvy, recently added to some list as a tech friendly city (saw it on www.ncbr.com, but can't find the article now). Greeley on the other hand is just a little backward, at least in the tech and retail sectors. All of the big retail chains that move in here build half a store and wonder why it doesn't do well. Restaurants close early and wonder why nobody comes. It's just insanity.

Along those lines, we have only a handful (3 or 4) furniture stores. There was a La-Z Boy store in Evans, but it closed. The owners of the local Concepts store retired and closed the store when they couldn't sell it. One of the most recent casualties in the retail sector is Greeley Furniture downtown. As report in the Tribune, Greeley Furniture was owned by it's current owners for nine years and closed recently.The building was for sale at 1.8 Million USD. I'm no real estate guru, but this is one of those old rambling furniture stores. The location has been a furniture store for a long time and it shows. You can see where the owners bought neighboring businesses and consolidated them into a much bigger store. I was actually only in there once, last year. It's interesting how out of touch the owners of the store appeared to be. Most pieces were very traditional, I saw little that I would even want to buy. Prices were higher than I would expected. For such a big rambling location it seemed like everything was the same.

A couple years ago I visited some family in Kearney Nebraska and visited a furniture store there. It was similar to Greeley furniture in layout, but there were actually items there that were reasonably priced and quite a large selection. One of the owners of Greeley Furniture is working on re-opening, which is good news for both the downtown area and the city as a whole. Hopefully he will make some adjustments in service, selection and price to be more successful. I know there are residents that can afford quality goods, from furniture to electronics, but many of us make trips to Fort Collins or even Denver because there just aren't local businesses offering what we want.