Valley’s Future Is Up To You

It's 2015.

Waitsburg is a thriving town with every store front filled with merchandise, customers and activity. Visitors come from all over to experience a one-of-a-kind Main Street.

During the day, families wander up and down the sidewalks, patronize the hardware and grocery store, browse at the retail stores and linger at the coffee shop or the diner or the Mexican restaurant.

At night, they move their feast from one downtown restaurant to another, one bar to the next, while all together supporting several dozen jobs and helping to pay for vital community services through the taxes all these hot spots provide for the city.

Then the visitors drive home or stay overnight at one of the town's many boutique lodging establishments.

Just up the road, Dayton flourishes in the same manner.

Music spills into the streets on weekends and travelers sample shops they later recommend to their friends. The Touchet Valley has become one of the Northwest's most popular destinations.

It's 2015.

Waitsburg and Dayton are ghost towns. The wind whistles through the boarded store fronts. Almost every business is shuttered. Few travelers stop to look around. Occasionally, they pull over to slip their credit card into the pump at the gas station, sending the profits straight to some distant corporate headquarters.

Then, they quickly drive on, shaking the sadness that washed over them as they drove through the Touchet Valley. If only there were another highway to avoid the area altogether.

It's a tale of two futures and the outcome is in your hands.

We write this consumer "call to arms" every year in the weeks leading up to Christmas and we mean it every year.

Shop here first! Your cities depend on it.

Over the past several years, a number of courageous entrepreneurs have made a commitment to hang out their shingle downtown, joining the venerable generation of existing business owners, together hoping to offer something unique on Main Street that has disappeared in many other rural parts of the country.

It's the familiar story of David against Goliath, with David being the down home mom-and-pop businesses and Goliath being the faceless big-box super stores or the faraway supplier on the Internet.

Though businesses here are blessed with a presence along Highways 124 and 12, and a proximity to Walla Walla and the Tri Cities, few merchants in towns of our size can thrive on sales to travelers alone.

They will not survive unless Touchet Valley residents in solid numbers chose to be as committed as they are to the economic health and welfare of our communities.

Sure, you may find some items cheaper at the big-box super stores or on the web, but if you wonder why small retailers here have to charge more for some things, remember that they don't have the high-volume purchasing power of giant companies and they have to cover the cost of bringing the merchandise to the your doorstep.

And don't assume you always do better at the mammoth merchants after you pay for your fuel and spend your valuable time driving there.

Consider what Waitsburg resident Maria Garcia wrote on Facebook after Black Friday.

"Purchased at the Waitsburg Hardware & Mercantile, a Hamilton Beach Belgian-style waffle maker for $31.86 (including tax) plus 7 cents in gas and a personal greeting from the store owner who knows me.

"The same at Wal Mart is $32.36 with tax plus $7.38 in gas and Black Friday crowds."