TubaForum.net

bloke wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 3:17 pm Is St. Paul less crime-ridden than Minneapolis?

tofu wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 5:26 pm

20I wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 4:12 pm 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.

bort2.0 wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 6:50 pm Like I said... industrial park... set up shop.. make and sell bags

The theater sounds cool and all, but..