The Coaster

By PAUL BOOTH
Wish You Were Here, the eclectic candy and gift shop on Cookman Avenue in Asbury Park, will be closing its doors for good at the end of the month said owners Kathy Ragauckas and Donna Harrison, marking an end for one of the pioneering business in the city’s downtown resurrection.

Wish You Were Here opened its doors five and half years ago when its neighbors were nothing but empty desolate spaces.

“I have a picture of the original owners outside the store surrounded by nothing but boarded up businesses,” said Ragauckas, who, with Harrison, bought the business about three years ago. For Wish You Were Here, which sells sandwiches and sweaters, gelato and jewelry, the past year has been a rough one, as it has been on much of the retail industry. “People just stopped spending like they used to, particularly the summer crowd,” said Ragauckas, who says she saw the retail market start sliding almost two years ago. Looking back on 2008, Ragauckas reminisced on a perfect storm of calamity for retail at her location. In the early part of the year the 600 block of Cookman Avenue was torn up to make way for new sewage lines, a project that lasted the better part of three months. “That killed the first quarter,” Ragauckas said. “Then gas prices went sky high.” Tourists were still coming, but they weren’t spending at anywhere near the levels of previous years. “People were beginning to budget,” she said. “They weren’t just grabbing things they wanted. Suddenly they wanted to know what they could get for $20.” Then, in September, the coup de gras, the stock market plummeted and consumer confidence was shaken. “I knew if I was going to have a terrible weekend or an O.K. weekend by how the market closed on Friday,” Ragauckas said. “If it closed down it probably wasn’t worth opening that weekend.” The financial strain augmented week by week, and, when it became too much to bear, Ragauckas and Harrison called it quits.

“Things could turn around in a year, or they might not,” Ragauckas said. “But we’re in a fiscal nightmare right now, and I don’t want to be standing here a year from now saying I wish I had gotten out.”

So they have. As have many this year in the city’s downtown area. In the past 12 months at least eight Cookman Avenue businesses have closed their doors; Moxi, Ciao Bella, Esphera, Trillium, Lowe Gallery, Motif, Isabella’s and Jake and Lucy’s.

“The area down here has become saturated,” Ragauckas said of Cookman Avenue. “It has definitely become harder to make a living.”

“I don’t think its necessarily Cookman Avenue or Asbury Park, its just a tough market out there,” said Mike Evans, owner of Mike’s Beach House, a neighbor of Wish You Were Here for the past three years.

“It’s sorry to see any business go, especially them,” he said, “They took it very seriously. It wasn’t just a hobby.”

It isn’t all doom and gloom for the city’s downtown, where some doors have closed others have opened. Paranormal Books and Curiosities, Belmonte’s, Il Pavone Gelato, and My Sisters Favorite Things are some of the new stores to open in the last calendar year.

“Times are tough down here and everywhere,” Evans said. “The best thing right now is for everyone to stick together, work with the Chamber of Commerce and get things done.”

“This is probably one of the toughest retail environments we’ve seen in a while,” said Tom Gilmour, the city’s Director of Commerce. “There is a new low level of consumer confidence, and it happened very quickly.

“One positive we can take from this though is that we’ve done a good job of creating momentum for some of our retailers to make it through this tough time,” Gilmour said. “Are some businesses going to go under? Unfortunately, yes. But I think we are in a good spot here in Asbury Park. I think we are in as a good a position as anyone to ride this out.”

Lacking the desire to ride it out, Ragauckas said its time to get back to a steady job with a steady income. She had previously spent 20 years with the Monmouth County Parks system. Harrison, who is the chocolatier for the business (all the chocolate is handmade), has maintained a corporate job throughout.

“My customers have been unbelievable,” Ragauckas said. “ They have been actively helping me find another job. They tell me to use them as a reference. That’s one of things I’m going to miss, those relationships” she said, then added quickly, “but in many ways, I’m ready for a break.”
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