Ann Cari: big worries
for small-business owner

At an age where her biggest concern should be spending more time with her grandkids, Ann Cari is teetering on the edge of an economic precipice.

It’s not that the 75-year-old Cari is in dire financial straits herself.  But she is very worried about what will happen to “my guys and girls,” the eight people who work at her business – the Inside Outlet furniture store in Elkhart – if she is forced to close its doors.

“I’m really, really concerned about my people,” she said when msnbc.com first visited her 40,000-plus-square-foot showroom on Bristol Avenue in late March. “I’ve had some of them 15 years, 11 years … they’ve become family.”

Her concerns are not without foundation in Elkhart County, where an unemployment rate in the high teens is sending ripples throughout the local economy, especially hurting retailers and service providers.

Cari’s store is the last holdout of what was once a thriving furniture sector in the city of Elkhart, which at one point had eight separate showrooms that drew customers from all over northern Indiana and southern Michigan.

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She has managed to keep her business open during the ongoing recession only by injecting much of the money that she had put aside after 30 years in the furniture business and by reducing her employees’ hours. And she’s not sure how much longer she can hang on if things don’t turn around.

‘It's hard, very hard’
“We’ve had eight days in a row when not one customer came in here,” she said. “… But the overhead is still there and we have the truck to run, so it’s hard, very hard.”

Cari’s current struggles are the flip side of what has been, until recently, an American success story.

A native of Tiverton, R.I., who worked as a physical therapist in Connecticut and Chicago before becoming a stay-at-home mom, Cari moved to northern Indiana in 1970 with her husband, Charlie, when he took a job in the RV industry.

She got into the furniture business after her kids, Steve and Kimberly, were old enough that they didn’t require full-time supervision.

“I’ve always loved furniture and I spent a lot of my free time shopping, so finally I thought, ‘Why not open a furniture store?’” she said.

She took the plunge with a partner, opening a small shop in nearby South Bend in 1979. But she soon bought out her partner and moved into a bigger store in Mishawaka.

“I thought it was a great business for women who didn’t want to work a lot of hours because of kids,” Cari recalled. “Initially we were only open during what I called ‘mothers’ hours – 10 to 3 – when the kids were in school. Then, as the kids got older, the hours got longer.”

The store prospered and Cari was able to expand, first opening a shop in Niles, Mich., and then adding a third store in Elkhart in 1990.

In the early years, Cari said she did a lot of learning on the job and plowed all her profits back into the business.

Learning on the job
“I didn’t know a darn thing about running a business,” she said. “I’d never taken a bookkeeping class or any business classes. But you learn a lot when you have to.”

The main lesson was that running a small business is a big job.

“I didn’t realize it would be so time-consuming,” she said. “I worked all day and did paperwork at night.”

But of all the challenges she has faced over the years – including the loss of the Michigan store in a fire in the mid-’90s — none compares to that presented by the current recession, Cari said.

“I’ve seen downturns before, but I’ve never seen it like this,” she said. “The hardest part is telling people that you have to cut their hours.”

A lot of small-business owners talk about how their employees are like family, but Cari also walks the walk. For instance, one of her furniture movers came to work for her six year ago, when he was living at the Faith Mission of Elkhart, which helps the impoverished and people with substance abuse problems get back on their feet.

“He’s a nice person, but you know he doesn’t drive,” she says of the worker, who she fears would be unable to land another job if she went out of business. “I send someone to pick him up every day and bring him home because that’s the only way he can get to work. That’s just part of doing business. … That’s the way you have to be.”

Cari will be OK if she has to shut the business.  She and Charlie have some retirement savings and a “going out of business” sale would likely recoup some of the money she has invested in the store.

But if she can, she would like to keep the Inside Outlet running and providing decent jobs — including hers — in a community that sorely needs them.

“I love to work,” she said. “If it keeps going, I’m staying.”