Ithaca Merchants Pin Hopes on Free Sex
Just when Ithaca merchants thought that things couldn't get any worse on the Commons, the City Council decided to pass an aggressive new panhandling ordinance. Now the Commons is really dead!
Yep, it seems that, on any given day, most of the folks you'd spot downtown had simply come to bum smokes and loose change, or hang out in front of Jabberwock, hoping that the weather would improve enough to drag out the bongos. Now that the Dollar Store has closed, what reason would most people have to come to the Commons?
This sad state of affairs has prompted some downtown shopkeepers to take drastic measures. Jim Curon, owner of Ithaca Soaps, faced with declining standards of hygiene in Granola City, has pulled out all the stops. Jim is offering prospective customers sex with his ex-wife as an inducement to visit his downtown emporium. According to Mr. Curon, interviewed outside his downtown boutique on a snowy Tuesday morning, " Sales don't work anymore unless you're liquidating your entire inventory.April Cornell, that little shop up near Robbie Dein's, had more customers on the last day of their closing sale than they had in their entire three years of being open. The way I look at it is that you have to give people what they really want. That's the only thing you can do to bring them downtown now that the City has reduced the two hour free parking limit."
Mr. Curon's ex-wife could not be interviewed for this article. A part-time employee at Ithaca Soaps, questioned in the middle of a phone interview she was conducting with a prospective employer, told us, "Mrs. Curon is busy."
"Look, I've tried everything. I've tried adding new products, guava soaps from the amazon basin, hiring attractive young babes from Ithaca College and Cornell,taking out full page ads in the Journal, offering free showerheads with every $10 purchase. Nothing seems to work. This is my living. It's either this or drive a taxi part-time and eat at the soup kitchen. Anyway, Rosmary doesn't mind. She'd rather be doing something than just sitting around, handing the bathroom key out to the homeless."
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 10:03 AM
