As recently as a week ago, after-hours callers to Fringe & Fray would be met with a recorded message.
"We are open Monday through Saturday, 12 pm to 6 pm," it stated. "And masks are required."
The downtown resale boutique's masking policy ended in 2022 along with the official statewide mandate, but the voicemail greeting — since updated — shows how certain vestiges of the COVID era persist even now, five turbulent years after the pandemic first erupted. The ways society rearranged itself in response to that highly contagious and potentially fatal disease are still playing out to different degrees.
Of all the problems COVID produced, the "hot-button issue" of masking was one of the most fraught, recalls Grace Johnson, who owns and operates Fringe & Fray with her husband, Ryan.
"Once we reopened, I think we were challenged by navigating the pandemic as a small business, just how to implement safety protocols so our customers felt safe and still welcome here when they came in," she says.
Today, Fringe & Fray is still reclaiming the space it once cleared for social distancing. Removing four clothing racks from the floor had the unfortunate side-effect of reducing the store's maximum available inventory, and Johnson says that they've slowly been trying to add more merchandise as they work to restore the lost racks.
Social distancing wasn't the only "pivot" — the pervasive pandemic buzzword to describe rapid changes in business models and practices — that the boutique made. Shortly after lockdowns began, the Johnsons joined many other businesses in launching an online counterpart to their brick-and-mortar store.
"There was definitely an uptick in online shopping, but we saw that people weren't buying, say, a pencil skirt anymore. They would buy some leggings because they were working from home and [on video calls] you could just see them from the waist up," Johnson says.
Based on her anecdotal experience, that trend for comfort clothing has endured, even if many professionals have since returned to the office. By contrast, partly because of the attention it required from their small staff, Fringe & Fray wound down its online shop after lockdowns were lifted.
THE NEW NORMAL?
Given that online marketplaces have long been a part of buying and selling collectibles, Spokane's Resurrection Records didn't have to pivot in the same way as clothing and home décor businesses like Fringe & Fray."I closed way before there was any sort of lockdown, and I saw a lot of record stores across the country doing the same thing. I've been selling records online for 21 years now, so it was really no issue for me to just go to online only," says Resurrection Records owner Mike House.
But House didn't quite anticipate the sharp rise in demand for vinyl, which may have been driven by concert-starved music lovers wanting to connect with artists and albums in a tangible way.
"Once those [stimulus] checks started coming out, it was crazy," House says. "I've never been busier online before. The morning that those checks would come out, I just had to turn off my online store. I'd turn it on once every couple of days and get, I don't know, 80 to 100 orders in just a couple hours."
House says that the economic stimulus checks served their purpose in fueling short-term buying. The downside, as he sees it, is that the influx of "free money" led to surges in discretionary spending that contributed to inflation, ultimately causing the cost of goods to hit new heights.
In the wake of the pandemic, House estimates that he's paying at least 50% more for manufacturer-direct records as well as items like the distilled water he uses to clean his secondhand stock.
So far, however, the higher price tags on the record sleeves haven't deterred customers.
"When I started" in 2016, he says, "there were multiple days when I would have no one in the store at all. Now, I'll go days without having, like, one minute between a customer leaving and another coming in. On a weekend, I'll probably have 20, 30 people in at a time."
While that's an encouraging sign for record stores, the current economic climate has left Johnson at Fringe & Fray feeling a little uneasy. She's seen other small, independently owned boutiques — in Spokane and nationwide — struggle to regain their footing after the pandemic, and she worries that recent economic instability could start affecting more than eggs and imports.
"To the reader, I would say leave your house and support the small businesses that you love. They're the heart of the city," she says.
But, just to be safe, Fringe & Fray is also revisiting its pandemic pivots and looking at reopening its online shop. ♦
