Holiday Stroll To Offer Nighttime Shopping In Orleans

ORLEANS – Molly Avellar would love to keep her store, Adorn, open later. But as it is, there aren’t enough people shopping into the evening to support it.

“I’ve tried staying open later, and even in the summer, when five o’clock rolls around it’s quiet,” said Avellar, who co-owns her boutique shop on Main Street in East Orleans alongside her mother, Jenny.

Perhaps one day that will change, allowing more businesses in town to keep their doors open later into the evenings. For now, Avellar is helping spearhead a Holiday Stroll tomorrow (Friday), which promises to offer residents and visitors a taste of nighttime holiday shopping.

The Dec. 15 stroll is being coordinated by the Orleans Chamber of Commerce, of which Avellar is a member. She and Emily Richardson, owner of Homegrown Boutique on Main Street, spearheaded a “shop small” subcommittee of the chamber to launch the event, in which more than 80 local businesses will stay open from 4 to 8 p.m.

“It’s just bringing everyone together to do a collective thing,” Avellar said. “And I think the energy right now is pretty great. Everyone’s really excited.”

The chamber’s executive director, Judy Lindahl, said the idea to organize the stroll grew out of discussion among chamber members about how to better support local shops and restaurants during the holiday season, a critical time of year for many small, independent businesses.

During the stroll hours, local businesses will offer their own deals and incentives for shoppers. And now through Friday, shoppers can also enter a raffle for a chance to win $1,000 in local gift cards.

“So it gets them back into the stores for more holiday shopping,” Lindahl said.

The chamber plans to host the stroll annually, while Lindahl said there’s also been talk about hosting additional stroll events during the summer. But in the long term, the chamber hopes that some momentum might eventually be built in town to better support those local businesses that want to be open later on a more regular basis.

Lindahl said it will take a strong, coordinated effort among the town’s local businesses, such as that showcased in Friday’s Holiday Stroll, to create more shopping options for residents and visitors into the evening hours. That includes buy-in from chamber and non-chamber members alike, she said.

“Orleans is only going to become a better, richer, happier place to live if everyone works together,” she said. “So from the Orleans Chamber perspective, that’s what I’m trying to convey.”

“You can’t just have two businesses on either end of town being open until 7 and expect people to want to come out after five,” Avellar said. “It has to be a collective thing, and it’s something that’s going to take time. It’s not going to happen overnight.”

The sleepiness of downtown Orleans is a topic of conversation that frequently crops up in public discussion. Select Board Chair Michael Herman, who worked in retail for 35 years, said the town’s population — which skews toward older residents and retirees — has made it harder for the town to sustain itself as a later community.

“It’s a challenging makeup that we have in this town,” he said. “If you have a high population of people who have free time during the day, they can get everything they need to get done before five.”

There’s also the ability of staying open later year round versus staying open later during the busy summer tourist season, which Herman called “two very different conversations.”

For some small businesses, staffing is also an issue, Lindahl said. Some business owners don’t have staff beyond themselves to operate.

“That makes it difficult to [stay open later] on a nightly, weekly basis,” she said.

In 2022, the town completed an economic development plan designed to help reinvigorate Main Street and downtown Orleans, as well as Route 6A down to Town Cove. The plan emphasized the need for making downtown more amenable to multi-modal transportation, including better accessibility for bicyclists and pedestrians. It also recommended introducing more recreational and experiential offerings for residents and visitors.

The plan also recommended the creation of a new staff position, economic and tourism director, as well as a new economic development committee to help shepherd the plan. Lindahl, who serves on the new committee in an ex-officio capacity, said the committee and the town need to take a hard look at existing zoning to find ways of making it easier for merchants who want to do business in town to open up shop. That could include better streamlining the local permitting process, she said.

“Zoning has to change for us to institute greater change in Orleans,” she said.

For Avellar, the holiday season is the perfect time of year to start testing the waters of a later, more vibrant downtown Orleans.

“Downtown looks beautiful right now with all the work they’ve done,” she said. “It’s lit up for the holidays. It’s festive, so it does make shopping at night a whole different experience.”

Herman said it’s up to businesses to decide how late or early they want to be open, and said the town and the select board are supportive of those businesses that want to stay open later. The question, he said, is whether the demand will be there among shoppers after the holiday season passes.

“I think what the chamber is doing is excellent to see if there is an interest in people to shop,” he said. “Will there be interest in January from four to eight o’clock? I don’t know if there will be.”

But Avellar sees events like the Holiday Stroll as a way of helping the Orleans business community carve out its own unique commercial niche. From that, she sees the potential for a business community that can cater as much to the dinner time crowd as to daytime shoppers.

“I see a really bright future for Orleans,” she said. “We want to get people to Orleans for Orleans, not because we’re something else. We’re creating our own identity. We have so many amazing independent small businesses here.”

Email Ryan Bray at ryan@capecodchronicle.com