Dear Mr.Landlord, please take down your “For Sale By Owner” sign now in two windows of the Round House Cafe.
You have every right to sell your building to anyone you wish at any time, and I have the right to tell you how I feel about it. Curiously, the fate of a community cafe is everyone’s business, even thought I believe strongly in minding my own.
I trust you are a good man who cares about our community. I believe the posting of this sign in the window of a popular and necessary business is a mistake that does not serve anyone’s interest, including yours.
Yesterday, a number of people contacted me to tell me that the Round House had gone out of business, they didn’t know that Scott and Lisa Carrino took a few days off. Like me, none of them had ever seen a going business with a “For Sale By Owner” sign in the window, this is an almost universal sign of a business failing or closing.
That is not a good message for any business. And it seemed a not-too-subtle threat to me.
Why do people care? Because this issue is not just about you and your building, but the future and character of a rural community struggling against very big odds to keep its own soul intact. I have no illusions that I can and should tell you what to do, but I have to wonder about the thoughtfulness or wisdom of a move like these tacky signs.
I am an author now, but I was once often involved in complex negotiations when I edited a newspaper and produce a network news broadcast, I negotiated with agents, anchors, monumental egos and complicated issues. I think I know pressure tactics when I see them, and I also know the dangers of bluffing.
In our negotiations with some very difficult people,we often talked about good faith and bad faith. When I saw those ugly signs in the windows of the very carefully maintained Round House Cafe, the term bad faith came to my mind.
A savage and skilled negotiator taught me once never to bluff in a negotiation. If I say it, mean it and be prepared for the consequences. But if I mean to negotiate, then shut up and negotiate.
I am not privy to the details of these negotiations, although I gather they are just beginning to get underway. Scott and Lisa Carrino have been working almost brutishly hard to maintain and repair the cafe building, and also been working for months to raise enough funds to purchase it from you.
The cafe building, an old bank building, has been for sale for nine years I imagine you are nearly desperate to sell it at a fair price, I know Scott well. He is my friend but does not share my ideas about many things, including negotiating. He is nicer than me. He does not know I am writing this, and played no part in it.
Scott is killing himself to offer you a fair price. People all over the country have generously dedicated to this cause, sending Scott more than $60,000, much of that money in very small bills, some on his crowdsourcing site. It is a good cause, since World War II, the economists and politicians who run our country have decided that farms and rural communities are too small and inefficient to be relevant in the new world.
We have seen our children leave, our businesses close, our community institutions crumble. I think we have had enough of that, the Round House Care is a symbol to many of us, not just a cup of coffee or a sandwich.
Your first obligation is to yourself, but I hope you will think of these people and hear their messages.
They all share this idea of community, and empathy for the plight of towns like ours that have been ignored and left behind in the great move towards a global and corporatized economy.
The corporations that run America now do not care about cafes in small towns, but the people who live in small downs care very much about having at least one place to gather and talk to one another.
I found your signs ugly and disturbing, a jarring contrast to the great care Scott and Lisa have taken with every sign, table and menu item in their cafe. I wanted to take them down myself, but Scott asked me not to. That is not really his way, my guess is that he will want to call you up and talk about it. That really is his business and yours.
My idea of a good faith negotiation is for the two sides to talk openly and privately about their goals, needs and differences and give each other time to reach an agreement or agree to disagree.
To me, bad faith is posturing and threatening. The signs are invasive, it does your cause no good to advance the idea that the cafe is failing, the truth is very much the opposite. It seems ludicrous to think someone driving by will buy your $250,000 building because of your signs when it has been on the market (and online) for nine years.
And when someone who loves it is trying desperately to buy it.
Or that you couldn’t wait a few weeks to see if these negotiations can succeed.
To me, good faith would be negotiating and waiting to see what happens. You can always put up a sign in the window. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if there were still a cafe inside?
