Bad news.
Petland, longtime independent pet store in Kahala, is closing, according to a story in Pacific Business News.
PBN quotes Richard Matsui, son of store owner Ken Matsui.
“In my lifetime, the shifts that I saw was they survived Walmart coming into town,” Matsui said. “They survived Petsmart coming to town. Petco coming to town. But I think it’s a real question about whether or not we would survive in the era of Amazon having that big warehouse opening up. My understanding is that Amazon’s going to start offering same-day delivery. So, you’re going to have this player that’s going to have a convenience level that can’t be beat — same-day delivery to your door — at a cost structure that’s just fundamentally different than any local business here.”
I vividly recall my father’s small restaurant supply business confronting the earlier business upheaval after Costco opened its first store in Honolulu. This was probably somewhere around 1995 or so, a few years before he finally retired at age 85.
Several years before, he had given us a set of good quality plastic chairs to set out on our back deck in Kaaawa. These were commercial quality, better than the plastic chairs normally found in discount stores. This were items he pulled from his Honolulu Restaurant Supply Company inventory, as process he repeated on many holidays.
At some point, to explain the impact of the “big box” stores, he said customers were now able to buy the same chairs at Costco for a lower price than he was offered by the manufacturer after many years as an authorized dealer. It was becoming harder and harder to escape the shadow of Costco and the other national retailers. He retired just a few years later after finishing “one last big job,” which was a complete renovation of the kitchens at what was then the Hotel Hana Maui.
We’re going to miss the convenience of Petland in Kahala, and the benefit of buying from a locally-owned small business.
It’s also personal. If I’m not mistaken, we brought home our first cat, a tiny gray kitten tiger, from Petland’s predecessor, Birdland, in Ala Moana Center in 1969. Meda and I had been married for less than a month, and just returned to Honolulu to enter graduate school. That kitten grew into a great cat. She lived to the age of 19, and died not long after we moved to Kaaawa in the summer of 1988.
