October 1999: Moab: Cash Killed Our Cachet

by Jim Stiles

  This seems to have been a bad summer for a lot of Moab merchants. Many Main Street businesses are reporting drops in sales. There is genuine concern out there that tourism is falling off, although visitation increases at Arches would hardly support such a notion. At the same time, Moab has been getting some negative press lately. From The Salt Lake Tribune to magazines like Inside. Outside..Southwest, we seem to have lost our charm.

     What a surprise.

     Rob Schultheis, in Inside. Outside, wrote that "Moab doesn't look like it fell off the back of a truck anymore; now it look like it fell off a thousand trucks. It's Big Sprawl instead of Little Sprawl. And boy are there a lot of people there. People and stuff. Too much of both."

     For the purely economics-minded, profit/loss, bottom line type, the problem in Moab lately is that there is more stuff than there are people to buy the stuff. The town is overbuilt. There are more retail businesses than can survive a fluctuating tourist economy (and in a tourist economy, fluctuation IS the norm).  

     And most importantly, we have lost the weird, funky charm that made us an attraction in the first place.

     Once again, I think it's worth remembering what Moab was like ten years ago. At the turn of the last decade, Moab was an ex-uranium town that had fallen on some hard times. A couple of ex-miners named Bill and Robin Groff were the unlikely promoters of a bicycle shop and the sport of mountain biking took off like a rocket. While the locals (including this grouch) grumbled and groaned about these lycra-clad freaks, it certainly made for interesting conversation.

     Main Street was still predominated by locally-owned businesses and, best of all, locally owned restaurants and cafes'. There wasn't a Big Mac or a Whopper to be found in Moab. In 1989, I think there were about ten motels in town. We had wonderful and colorful politicians like Jimmie Walker and David Knutson who, even though I disagreed with them about 90% of the time, still managed to stimulate the electorate and keep everyone involved and plugged into the political process (can anyone today even name all the members of the city and county council?).

     We were an ugly town, but in an honest and unpretentious way. And that is why people loved us--because we were so weird. We developed a certain cachet that became known throughout the land. Our cachet was our ugly, honest weirdness.

     But cash killed our cachet.

     We should have all known this would happen and it would probably have taken a wise and benevolent dictator to prevent it. But now the mainstay of our tourist economy, the regularly returning out-of-town visitors, come here and look at all the franchise pre-fab food shops and the modular motels and the goofy chairlifts and shake their heads and wonder where else they can go. Are there any honest weird tourist towns left out there?

     If there are, and we find them, they won't be weird for long. They'll look just like us.

     And that is the catch in having a cachet.