.

[tofu]

[

[bloke]

Is St. Paul less crime-ridden than Minneapolis?

For any manufacturer that does mostly mail-order (but might possibly have an occasional walk-in/drop-in/scheduled-visit customer), I don't know why they would consider being inside a large city...or maybe - even in an incorporated town...as long as they're within (maybe) an hour of some airport with commercial passenger flights...or (if not that) just a place to drop off stuff at a post office or UPS/FedEx...or a truck depot (and - these days - more-and-more truck depots are being built away from cities for all the same reasons - with those remaining having erected 12-ft. heavy chain-link/razor-wire/electrified fences.

It's simply going to be (if in some big city) much higher rent, higher insurance, higher taxes, and a higher risk of being burglarized, robbed, or shot.

I'm not claiming that it's any of my business...All I'm saying is that - in 2023 - I don't get it.

[bort2.0]

Is St. Paul less crime-ridden than Minneapolis?

Overall, it's pretty much the same. Both cities have good parts and bad parts.

Cronkhite/Torpedo's location in Minneapolis was about 1 or 2 blocks north of the riots. Honestly, they were lucky that their building wasn't destroyed, because so many directly next to them WERE destroyed. But even before the riots... not the best part of town.

St Paul has good and bad parts, too. I got the "we moved" email too, but wow that's too many words. I may have missed the new address, but I didn't see it. I hope they moved somewhere decent.

Sounds like quite a lot of work to the building, so I hope they bought it cheap. Sounds neat and all, but jeez, if it was me, just find a damn space in an industrial park and get on with it.

[20I]

I tried purchasing a Cronkhite bag about month ago. No order acknowledgement, no shipping info, no nothing. After a few weeks, I filed a complaint with PayPal to obtain a refund. Nothing has changed since well before the pandemic. Perhaps they should spend their time on having some semblance of customer service rather than writing nonsense. The bags are nice. I won’t go through the motions to attempt to buy another.

[TheHatTuba]

Not a single "and that's the way it is" so far

[York-aholic]

He’s certainly thinking “long term”.

[tofu]

[

[bort2.0]

Like I said... industrial park... set up shop.. make and sell bags

The theater sounds cool and all, but..

[arpthark]

The main takeaway from this thread is not to renovate a movie theater to house my collection of 15 vintage cars.

[20I]

I tried purchasing a Cronkhite bag about month ago. No order acknowledgement, no shipping info, no nothing. After a few weeks, I filed a complaint with PayPal to obtain a refund. Nothing has changed since well before the pandemic. Perhaps they should spend their time on having some semblance of customer service rather than writing nonsense. The bags are nice. I won’t go through the motions to attempt to buy another.

Oh come on now. I get it as I had the same experience cancelling an order. It's a small biz that had problems from the beginning with the transition from a small boutique shop run by the founder from it's founding and moving it half way across the country. It's a unique highly custom made labor intensive item. In hindsight perhaps at the start they should have concentrated on generic 3 sizes fits all bags, but all the faithful would have screamed bloody murder that they had abandoned the beloved Chronkhite Custom bags everyone loved. Then Covid happened combined with they were located right at the heart of the George Floyd riots which occurred subsequently. As I understand it their business Torpedo Bags was located across the street and I assume that was why they located close by. I doubt that Torpedo is a deeply capitalized business either. This is one of the problems of small businesses when the tough times come as they always do for firms. Many a large successful firm now had several close calls with going under early on in their existence. It's why the majority of small firms fail.

Renovating an old theater? Anybody who knows anything about those places knows what a money pit they are. My town has one of those old ornate theatrical theaters from the 1920's with the big organ that arises from a pit to do the soundtrack. This saga has been going on for 40 years of several unsuccessful efforts to bring it back to life by well heeled individuals and groups and non-profits. It just eats money. The last attempt was to make the city take it on. They almost manage to convince the city council. One member said - wait a minute - let's let the voters decide in a referendum. The backers though it was a slam dunk. Instead it was a no vote from 90% of voters. They were in shock and the politicians ran away from that project at warp speed. Today 15 years later it still sits there decaying as the well heeled individual savior has sunk a ton in it to only fall farther behind. So yes I can only imagine that Steve the owner got the place for a song and thought it would be easy peasy to make it work. Ha Ha.

Reminds me of when I got the idea to restore a timber frame barn for my 15 vintage car collection based on the ones the Updike did (ceo Upjohn Pharmaceutical) did in Michigan just north of Kalmazoo Michigan which he donated to the Classic Car Club. I quickly realized this idea would be an endless money pit. Concurrently this Old House was attempting to restore an old timber framed barn. After the fifth episode or so Norm Abrams raised his hands and said no way. They tore it down and built a new timber framed barn. I thought to myself if Norm can't do it there's no way I'm gonna do it. But I can see how a small biz could find itself on a road they should have never gone down and never realizing when it was time to cut and run. Likely in this case with the Theater Chonkhite bought they had so much down the hole before realizing the true mess it was that they didn't think they had an alternative - which again is a mistake a lot of small businesses find themselves in.

But it sounds like they have started to come out the other side and I think it's good for us to support them as the options for bags these days are poor at best. After I cancelled my order I tried to get a 1293 Bag from Miraphone. After 6 months I cancelled that as well. So it's not just Cronkhite that has been slow on delivery. You would think that a big established player like Miraphone would have been much quicker to get back to normal after Covid then a small undercapitalized outfit like Cronkhite but that hasn't been the case either. Superfine stopped making cases. There are few options left other than a bad poorly made poor fitting generic bag nowadays. So I'll most likely put in another with Cronkhite in a few weeks.

I’ll summarize: A poorly-managed business loses customers. Simple as that.

[donn]

My only complaint is that I can't see the pictures.

The world could use a lot more people like that who have so much energy and ability to put into fixing and making things.

[kingrob76]

Like I said... industrial park... set up shop.. make and sell bags

The theater sounds cool and all, but..

my HUNCH is that they OWN the theater, but, an industrial park setup probably involves leasing and even mutli-year agreements have to be renewed. Given the rising cost of rent this probably makes long terms sense, and they won't have to move for a long time. Carrying the asset of the property is a liability, but, I suspect the math works better (and they probably got it for a song) and this tells me they plan to be around for a while.

You should see the setup Ivan Giddings bought in MO. I swear his shop is 2 basketball courts long. Ok, maybe 1 1/2. And it's just him.

[arpthark]

Are other Torpedo activities also moving to this building?

[Mary Ann]

I hope they enjoyed their project, which to me sounds like fun even if very long term fun (I had to totally re-do the inside of the house I now live in, and it took quite a while and was fun for me.) However -- my one problem is they said they put bleach on the moldy wall. Bleach does not kill mold; it just bleaches it. So I hope that the vapor barrier they put in is sufficient to keep spores and mycotoxins out of their workspace, because otherwise there could be illnesses develop that nobody, but nobody, can figure out the cause of, depending on the type of mold and the genetic susceptibility of the people who spend their days there. There are lots of ways to deal with mold correctly and that's not one of them. That said --- they sound like reasonably young and enthusiastic people and hopefully within a short time the customer interface will be as renovated as the buildings. I have an old RB bag for my horn that is going to outlast me.

[bloke]

Most theaters involve a long slanted floor. Maybe they have a way of dealing with it or maybe this one isn't like that. There was a music store in Memphis that mostly just sold pianos and sheet music called Pilant music. It was in the old recently-closed-down Bristol Theater - which had shown B movies like first-run Elvis movies and car crash movies when it was still a viable theater. Before that, it showed Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, and junk like that. The floor was slanted all the way, but it was sort of difficult to notice.

fair warning:
Wandering way-Way off topic, the Blackwood Brothers leader, Cecil, opened up a music store in a long-since-bulldozed large rambling brick house (with a huge long porch) across from my elementary school, because he actually lived in a pretty modest house only about six blocks to the north of that house - as the music store house was right on Highway 70 / Summer Avenue. It didn't last very long, because I suspect they didn't really have enough money to stock it very well. They hardly had anything in there, frankly. I went to school with Mark Blackwood - who now owns and sings lead In the Blackwood Gospel Quartet. Had I been one who was really interested in meeting celebrities, I could have hung out with Mark and met quite a few (everyone now knows how much Elvis loved gospel music, and he and the Blackwoods were pretty close) but that's never been an interest of mine. I've played behind so many myself - after all these years - that I certainly could have annoyed a whole bunch of them - and wasted minutes of my own lunch breaks - by shaking their hands and asking for a picture to be made. (I don't know them. They don't know me. I couldn't care less about them. They couldn't care less about me. I'm just a tuba player.) ... I've mentioned here before that John Cash lived several blocks northeast of our house, picked up his niece from high school every day (I suspect he borrowed money from his uncle), and my brother would often ride home with them...and that the founder of the Elvis Presley fan club was the daughter of the man who owned a advertiser newspaper - where my brother worked as a classified ad typesetter as a young teenager, and she invited him to a party at Audubon Park - where Elvis was there for the entire party, and this was back when Elvis' parents were still alive, lived across the street from the Park (pre-Graceland), and everyone went over there after throwing a football and a frisbee at the Park and swam in his pool while his mother - Gladys - served homemade cookies and lemonade. This was right at the breaking point of Elvis hitting it really big. (My brother is 13 years my senior.) Until a few years after Elvis died - and he started being merchandised - no one in Memphis really thought he was that much of a thing, and sort of chuckled that the rest of the world did. Elvis completely copied the vocal style and physical movements of Roy Hamilton. ie. It was one ~specific~ black entertainer, not just "Elvis imitated black music". Everyone in Memphis knew who that singer was, I knew that Elvis was just a copycat

See how off topic I can go in just one post?