Dear friends,
I wanted to share a significant change coming to East West. After a year of careful consideration and analysis, I have decided to dramatically shrink our events department. I consider each of you part of the East West family, so wanted to share both the news and the thinking behind this.
We will continue to have 1-2 major events per month.We will also continue the free events hosted by our Readers and Healers as it’s a great way for people to get to know them. But the many other events per month that have been drawing few people turned out to be an enormous amount of staff time, web design, etc. for little value to the store or the public. If attendance were much higher I’d feel like the service to the attendees alone made it worth doing, but as attendance has dropped steadily, the level of service becomes less and less significant. It seems people are Zoomed out! Between screen time at work and entertainment in the evening, adding more screen has apparently become much less attractive.
Our events department has been going strong for decades. Before covid it would draw many people to the store, which of course was an added benefit to the public and to East West. But the world has changed in many dramatic ways lately (have you noticed?!), and adapting to reality rather than holding on to a no-longer-in-existence past is generally a good strategy in both business and in life.
And finally I’d like to give a major shout out to our Events coordinator, David Leech. He has done a fine job trying to hold back the tides, but as usual, the tides have won. This will free him to spend more time on our Social Media efforts, which is a blessing. He is quite good at it, having been a major part of his work life for many years. I might add that he may have some free time given this change, so if you are in need of such a service, please email me here and I can put you in touch with him.
This change will take effect starting August 1st. Our weekly iContact will be slightly reformatted since it used to list all of our events. If there is anything you’d like to see in that every-Sunday letter, please let me know, as we will now have a bit more space. And as always, I love getting feedback and thoughts about anything East West oriented.
Thanks to each of you for your continued support in these trying times. East West continues to do exceptionally well in every possible way, in large part thanks to our thousands of loyal and lovely customers.
Blessings,
David G., manager
for the Gang at East West