Stores You Love to Walk Past

Can a Main Street survive on window shopping?

When I spent a week in New Jersey last fall, visiting a bunch of towns I grew up visiting as a kid, I spent one day on the road with my best friend growing up. We drove through Hunterdon County, starting in Frenchtown, then Clinton, and a couple of even smaller little towns. (Check out the long illustrated Twitter thread I did during that trip, some of which I’ve written up here, and some of which is coming.)

These are practically picture-perfect “quaint classic small towns,” places that are pretty small, but which have lively little Main Streets, restaurants with outdoor seating, boutiques, art galleries, and lots of cute stores. Neither of us does much shopping at the kind of stores that tend to be located in these kinds of towns. (The only thing I bought all week were some locally made pickles from a pickle store in Clinton. I’m not sure how pickles alone carry a whole downtown storefront, but they were very good!)