Michael and Shari Zuckerman, owners of The Toy Shoppe in Setauket, aren't leaving town quietly.
The couple on Wednesday and moving the business to North Carolina, where they claim the market for mom and pop retail is alive and well, something that can't be said about Long Island, according to them.
"This town, like many other Long Island towns, does not support its local stores. Many people in the town refused to step foot in the store for reasons we can’t put a finger on. The sentiment we got was that because we were small, we had to be overpriced. While true we were small, we held our line on price and service the big boys would have been jealous of," they wrote.
"If Long Islanders, and Three Village residents do not open their eyes, they will be without so many small stores they expect to find when they need them."
The pinch that small businesses feel these days as a result of the heavy congestion of Big Box retail on the North Shore of Suffolk County and more interest in consumers for shopping online has contributed to the emptying out of main streets like the ones in Kings Park, Smithtown, Upper Port Jefferson and Rocky Point as well as strip malls in places such as Commack and Port Jefferson Station where a mom and pop can be neighbor to an anchor tenant big-box store.
But the claims of the Zuckermans beg the question: Do you support your mom and pops? And, in your opinion, what needs to be done to keep small business on Long Island?
Let us know in the comments.
