After two years, Smarty Pants new and used children’s clothing store still hadn’t turned a profit. But that’s not why Shannon Lewis closed it. Her husband Lee lost his job and found a new one in Texas, so she is moving there with their kids.
Otherwise, Lewis says, she would have kept the store going. With the economic downturn, she says, “my sales were increasing.”
Lewis’s father, John Porter, used to run Back Pocket–Art in the Alley in Smarty Pants’s back room. He closed last fall because sales dried up. “I thought I was going to hang on for a while,” he says, but he lives in Novi and driving to Dexter six days a week cost him too much in gas.
