Desert pet care tips

A little late for some of the hot weather related items, but still pertinent:
Protecting your pet in the desert (from DesertUSA)

Hello, Petty Tyrants!

It's a good thing I've been offline for the last week or so, because what I wanted to post yesterday would have come back to bite me. My 'net connection mysteriously reappeared this morning after a night's sleep allowed me to cool down some.

I've been spending most of my available time marketing the pet sitting business, both on the web and in the real(ish) world. The online part has been a lot easier, partly due to my web builder background and work-from-home preferences but also thanks to a few maddening obstacles I hadn't completely anticipated.

In Ahwatukee there isn't a lot of publc space for publicizing small businesses. Signage is pretty much confined to brick-and-mortar stores, billboards, and anything you can legibly place on a moving vehicle. Sign walkers are usually tied to a nearby physical place of business, and in our recent spate of 110 humid degrees it'd be inhumane.

That leaves the more direct methods of marketing. Direct mail is out of my reach right now, and may always be. I could take a cue from landscapers and leave business cards on cars windows and front doors, but that's a little more labor-intensive than I can manage right now even without the swelter factor. Besides, if I am to target the advertising to pet owners, I need to do better than slap marketing materials into places where they are neither wanted nor needed.

So, the postering campaign. Any sort of public display can easily be ignored by those with no interest, so I figured if I could post a few flyers in common public areas then pet owners could take or leave the information as they like. From the outset I've been aware of the City of Phoenix's no-postering ordinance, so there was no way I was going to slap the flyers onto city-owned property. The Pecos Community Center had no such public spots for commercial advertising either, and I wouldn't want to post signs in our parks even if it was legit to do so.

Since Ahwatukee neighborhoods tend to use cluster mailboxes rather than individual ones, I looked through the Post Office website for any regulations or prohibitions on posting on the cluster boxes. I found none, although usps.com is not exactly the most usable site on the planet

I did a few test runs in my own neighborhood at first to see if there was any reaction from our regular letter carriers. Everything seemed kosher, and I even got a few calls from prospective clients. After an out-of-town trip last weekend, I started postering in a few surrounding areas.

Thursday afternoon I got a call from a woman who claimed to be a Post Office employee who informed me that use of USPS facilities was "against the law" and that I would be fined if I did not take them down. I told my anonymous caller that I had checked for postal regulations and had not found anything prohibiting me from doing so, but if she could tell me which "law" was in question here I'd be glad to comply.

My attempts to get more details from her were met with bureaucratic evasions and indifference, which in itself led me to believe that she really was from the Post Office. I tried returning her call to see if it was really a USPS number, but all I got were busy signals. On the fourth or fifth try the phone rang about a dozen times before shunting me to an automated system that simply asked for a security code. By then I'd figured it was not worth it to tangle with a vast federal bureaucracy that still had not discovered voice mail yet managed to determine that packages over thirteen ounces were a threat to homeland security and must be placed directly in the hands of a postal clerk.

Less than two hours later I had another call, this time from a sour-sounding woman who said she lived in one of the neighborhoods in which I'd postered. She asked if I'd gotten permission from the Homeowners Association to put up my signs. I told her that I had not but had spoken to the Post Office about it and would be taking down the flyers at their request. Before I could inform her that the HoA had no jurisdiction over USPS property (even if they'd like to think they do) she commented that "it makes the neighborhood look terrible".

She hung up before I could lose my, um, cool. My head was racing with thoughts of quasi-suburbanites trying to grow grass lawns in the hot desert, leaving unused backyard swimming pools uncovered in August, running sprinkler systems at noon or hosing down pavements to the point where the storm gutters were running for blocks, the endless stream of contractors' trucks parked on sidewalks ... and I was the one ruining the neighborhood.

HoAs are following the life cycle that labor unions went through in the 1970s. Starting as a collective force for a common interest, they've become creatures more interested in their own growth than in their original mission. They manage to do so by maintaining the illusion that they somehow preserve property values when in reality they may do more to lower them in the long run. Good thing I didn't print my flyers in Sedona Red....

So in the course of this week I've not only posed a threat to national security but also been pegged for sinking property values. I had no idea my little pet sitting service was such a force for evil and destruction.

Speaking of localism...

after I wrote the last post I read the lead "story" in Friday's Ahwatukee Republic section of the AZ Republic. Colleen Sparks' "Why leave Ahwatukee?" read like a PR piece written by a local chamber of commerce or homeowners association, and in fact much of it consisted of quotes from a member of the Foothills HOA board.

The reason I cite this article is that on the surface it discussed some of the reasons we live in, as Colleen put it, "the world's largest cul-de-sac". Ahwatukee Foothills may be the poster child for Phoenix's Urban Village model: technically part of the City of Phoenix, but in practice nearly a self-contained municipality. Having retail stores and services here within our political and geographic boundaries is an essential requirement for this sort of semi-isolation, and Sparks' article focuses on the fact that we have enough of those to keep shoppers and homeowners relatively happy.

But what she only barely touches in the piece is that while we have almost no lack of shopping and services here, it seems most of it is in the form of chains and big boxes rather than locally-owned businesses. She did mention a few local businesses, but the front page photo says it all: the HOA board member, standing outside a Blockbuster with a Starbucks cup in his hand.

I don't want to suggest that Sparks is not a good reporter. In fact, she generally does a good job covering our quasi-burb for the Republic, and the end of the piece covers a lot of what's genuinely great about our piece of the city. Furthermore, her blogging conveys a real sense of place - see her recent blog entry on the closing of the Coffee Plantation store at 48th & Warner. My point is that to be a place in itself, Ahwatukee needs to move beyond the big box strip mall model and grow more locally-owned businesses.

I don't expect our nominally local news supplement to be much of a booster behind this, as I suspect there isn't a whole lot of prospective advertising revenue from the likes of, oh, say, Ahwatukee Pet Sitting. But we have to start pushing Ahwatukee's economy to the next level, and we can do a lot better than patting ourselves on the back for having our own supermarkets.

Navigating the flash floods of localism

One thing I'm trying to do while growing this business is to buy goods and services from other local businesses whenever possible. It's pretty well established that money spent with locally-based businesses puts more money into local economies than money spent at national chains.

I've preached Localism for over fifteen years, sometimes to a fault, Here in Ahwatukee it can be hard to practice, especially since a lot of the would-be local businesses seem to be outside our urban village limits. Maybe that's just the relatively short time I've lived here, but as I drive through our commercial areas I see mostly Big Boxes.

In my line of work part of keeping local is a no-brainer. I work with veterinarians by neccessity, and with the exception of a certain national chain that will remain nameless here, vets tend to be locals. I'm not going to exclude a certain veterinary practice in Elliot Park from my service area just because it's part of that national chain, but I'm focusing on the neighborhood-based clinics.

I didn't do so well on this front yesterday: I had flyers to print, and took advantage of KinkEx's online printing services instead of taking my flyers over to a neighborhood copy shop. The truth is, it was a lot more convenient and efficient - I uploaded the files, paid by credit card, and picked them up when I was in the area. The nature of this particular service will set a high barrier to entry for smaller, independent copy centers - at least for a while.

To make up for it, I'm taking my Applied Laziness experiment over to Laloo's this morning and pump some local dollars into a local croissant and coffee.