Budget Cuts and the End of the Line
An Amtrak train departing Fullerton Station on the Southwest Chief line.
Well, the budget cuts come for us all, in the end. For the past year I've been a contractor for Amtrak where I've been working remotely from my desk at The Map Center. I've effectively been doing two full time jobs: one that keeps the lights on and one that I hope will one day. Thanks to aggressive federal pressure, there just isn't the budget to keep me on for another year at Amtrak so now I'm down to just the one job: the one that doesn't come with an income.
At Amtrak I've had the privilege of building live GTFS webmaps, designing clear and punchy popups and weeding out ArcEnterprise accounts. As Senior Cartographer, I spent a lot of time cleaning up maps and updating them to reflect their successful new line, the Mardi Gras, which now runs between Mobile AL and New Orleans LA for the first time since 2005, and making graphics for public as well as backend use. I've been speaking "designer" as well as "engineer" and "admin" and "passenger." It's been good work and the well-wishes around the office have been kind and earnest. My staffing agency handler has been less reserved. He's watching his portfolio of tech workers implode as more companies downsize and federal budgets get ever tighter. I'm not alone at Amtrak. They've been shedding labor in accordance with executive recommendations for months. As a contractor and consultant, I’m no stranger to staff shakeups. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s harrowing and exhausting and frustrating but I’ll be fine. If good can come of this it is in giving me this convenient demarcation point to stop and consider what it is that I’m trying to do here.
The Short Term
The Map Center is doing so much better than it was. This time last year, the store was comfortably breaking even with barely enough surplus to grow my book collection or buy new supplies. Today it’s so much more and yet it it is still far from being the employment that could pay my soaring apartment rent or my soaring health insurance rates. Breaking even and doing well are identical if neither can pay me to keep it all running. I’ll try to attract some part time or remote consulting work to keep myself afloat. I have plenty of savings and The Map Center has sufficiently elevated my profile that I anticipate an easier job search than similar periods have looked in the past. I’m older, wiser and hopefully that much more valuable in the job market. Seeing as we just passed the end of FY2025, I don’t expect much hiring until at least January.
In the meantime, I have several hundred copies of ‘Maps on Vinyl’ left. I just bought $2k worth of foamcore panels for mounting images. I’m waist-deep in a project that will install some maps in the Providence Place Mall with my new logo on it. I have stickers and merch and infrastructure to continue and even grow. On top of that, I’m entering The Holiday Season which is essentially retail on Easy mode. If I called it quits and tried to close up shop, there is no better time than right now to liquidate assets and so permanently closing The Map Center and just doing Christmas as usual have few things to differentiate them. Let folks scour the shelves bare and then I’ll decide in January if I want to restock and in what fashion I'll persist.
In the interim, I have a lot more time now. I have a couple of library speaking gigs booked. I’d like to run a few map and compass workshops and I might finally be in a position to make good on some longer term ideas that I have left on the table for new products. I’ll try to teach some QGIS courses and maybe even do a certification program the way that BayGeo is doing. I don’t think anyone else in the region is doing anything like that. I’ve also considered working more seriously on ‘Diving California’ or even reopen a discussion with a publisher who indicated some interest in a book pitch I made some time ago. Investing more in my online presence, buying some ads, running some specials and emphasizing some underutilized services might also be worth a try. In January I have to start thinking more long term. I’ve set myself a 6 month check in and by March I need to have a real answer to what The Map Center can be and, more importantly, what my own life looks like afterwards. I set myself a similar checkpoint of this time last year. One year is a naively optimistic amount of time to assess whether a small business has legs. Two and a half is more than reasonable. As I learned last December, you never know when something amazing could happen. Going viral on BlueSky completely changed my trajectory and I can’t rule out similarly wild and unpredictable events. I just can’t spend my life hoping that they’ll happen.
But for the next three months, there’s no chance of being bored and customers shouldn’t expect the door to be locked any time soon.
The Longer Term
I visited a storefront in downtown Providence last week. It was lovely and in a fantastic location. It was also far more than I could afford. If I were a small cafe and I were swarmed by customers, I might go to a bank and say “if only I had twice as many tables I could keep making more money!" But that’s not what I have. I have a store that some people really like and which makes about four times as much money as it did two years ago but still has fairly low sales numbers. I’d go to a bank and say “while it’s true I don’t make much money, I want a loan to get a larger, more expensive space because I believe a larger space could make the place feel more like a destination retail experience that would attract far more customers than the dilapidated mill I’m in currently” to which I would get the very reasonable question from the banker “How do you know that expansion wouldn’t just be failing in a bigger room?” And I wouldn’t have an answer for them. The two other businesses like this in North America are Metsker’s Maps in Seattle, a short walk from the cruise ship port, and World of Maps in downtown Ottawa. Both are midsize, dedicated retail locations in metropolitan hubs with large populations of educated people with money. It stands to reason that if The Map Center is to persist, it must move to a larger location with more tourists and cosmopolitan customers. Certainly it can’t stay at 545 Pawtucket Ave where the rents are rising and I still have to share a space with a 75 year old man who treats his own business like a hobby and leaves his library of personal toiletries on the hot water tank in the shared bathroom. I need a space that is clean, professional and evokes an image of higher value products and it needs to be in the kind of place where many people could visit. Since I sell unique and durable goods, I can’t expect to sell multiple items to the same community of people. I need a steady influx of new customers and Pawtucket can’t pull them in. Right now I’m a gallery, a museum, a book store, an education center, frame shop and a kids toy store and it’s not very good at any of them cramped into a tiny space that feels quite out of the way. Expansion and relocation seem necessary for survival but with that comes an enormous expansion in costs that I don’t know I have the wallet or conviction to shell out for. Especially now that I don’t have a real job to fall back on. Such a move would also require an enormous amount of work that I surely could not do while simultaneously holding down a regular job. It’s a catch 22.
There’s a very modestly priced place in Pawtucket that is next to the Slater Mill Historical Park that might be inexpensive and close enough to a nerdy tourist draw to be worth moving to even if it is farther from my target customers. Maybe I’ll move to Providence if something turns up. Downtown is largely empty but it is still expensive and the cheaper Olneyville neighborhood has loads of newly renovated mills that are mostly occupied by art studios and practice spaces that don’t rely on window-shopping curb-appeal for ground-level retail survival. Mine is not a high margin or high volume business which means that rent is a serious concern and they show no signs of letting up in Rhode Island. Buying a building is off the table until I have a regular job again and even if I did I don’t know if this is a place that would be good to invest in. Maybe Brooklyn would work. Or back to Oakland. My bullish enthusiasm in the spring has given way to a more cautious, risk averse strategy. I have some time to figure out how that would look, but what if The Map Center doesn’t give me any long term indications that it can be anything more than a deeply engrossing hobby with massive opportunity cost?
On Work
There’s a darkly funny song by the Bare Naked Ladies called “Enid” about an adult looking back on the regrettable immaturity of his first relationship.
“I can get a job, I can pay the phone bills
I can cut the lawn, cut my hair, cut out my cholesterol
I can work overtime, I can work in a mine
I can do it all for you
But I don't want to”
And surprising for a song about a 15 year old’s failed relationship, it’s one I think about a lot. I’ve been in relationships that were hard and I thought to myself, ‘I’ll just put in more effort. I’ll endure more discomfort. I’ll put in a few extra hours. All relationships are built on work and effort, after all.’ But at a certain point I’ve wondered whether a relationship is supposed to be so much work. Is it not also to produce happiness overall? I could do all that work but at a certain point, I don’t want to. When is one extra hour of labor just not getting you closer to whatever it is that you set out to do? When is quitting the right thing? I struggle with that. You can’t quit after the first hardship. Hardship is inevitable. But how many hardships does one reasonably weather before reevaluating the course? An answer to this question would solve many of my life’s problems including a few that I have no intention of sharing here. Running a small business is hard. Is it worth the feelings of pride and the fleeting sense of accomplishment? Is it worth giving up friends, companionship, hobbies?
Having a job meant having a nearly infinite runway from which to goad The Map Center into the air. Without one, I have a very real countdown that limits how long I can keep playing and not winning. Perhaps this is all for the best. Many people dabble at things for far longer than they should and being forced to decide affirmatively to continue and try new things or else abandon the effort for more productive endeavors is far better than limping along forever. I have long known that my body, mind and spirit are mortal things and that after the relentless work I’ve been putting in, any one of them was likely to give out. At least a bank account can tell you when it’s getting empty before it’s exhausted. The past two years have included some of the hardest chapters in my life. I moved across the country. I spent two weeks in a hospital dealing with this state’s insufferable healthcare industry. I lost my first remote job, the one I came to RI with, after being stretched too thin to do my work effectively. The dating scene is a disaster everywhere it seems but Rhode Island has been notably worse than the Bay Area and existing connections with close friends have frayed and strained with distance and fatigue. Sometimes I look around this shabby, cluttered store and I only see the limitations I was unable to overcome and the vision yet unfulfilled. The ideas that never made it off of the notepad. The countless hours in this one small room waiting for people who will never arrive. Who am I even doing this for? I don’t owe anyone this effort. I have hobbies and friends and curiosities that are just as worthy of cultivating.
So what would closing look like? Well, I’d first call dibs on the neon “MAPS” sign and the brass tape dispenser. And Evan Applegate’s illuminated coffee table. Everything else could be for sale as a complete business. I would be leaving it in substantially better shape than I’ve found it with strong assets, a more robust inventory, a rejuvenated brand, higher ratings on Yelp and Google Maps and even a bit of curiosity from far flung reaches of the state, ready to be contacted by an opportunistic successor or a passionate retiree who wants to buy a modestly profitable hobby business. I’ve considered soliciting a corporate buyout or partnership with a brand like Atlas Obscura, Trip Advisor, ESRI, Rand McNally or similar. I could liquidate the entire collection and donate what doesn’t sell to local schools and classrooms. I would, in all likelihood, move back to California or anywhere else if there was a job in it for me. It’s honestly hard to guess but I seriously doubt I’d stay in Rhode Island.
As is often the case with small business growth, there are fits and starts. Nothing is linear and I suspect I am all out of incremental improvements. The low hanging fruit has been picked. It’s entirely possible that I’ve done what I can, or at least, what I’m willing to do, to keep this business going while I remain in pursuit of my more fundamental goal of living a good life I can be proud of. I don’t think there’d be any shame in that, especially since part of this project’s allure was in its difficulty. If anyone could do it, surely I could have just let someone else do it. But at the same time, I’m not sure anyone else would have had nearly as much success as I’ve managed.
What I’m Proud of
This week is the two year anniversary of my arriving in Pawtucket and taking up residency as the Map Center’s fourth owner. I had thought to plan an event but the immodesty of the thing baffled even my nearly limitless love of attention. I am usually quite happy to preen in front of a camera but only because I want to capture a thing I’m excited about, I don’t like parties where the subject is me, personally. I’m glad I didn’t because in the current atmosphere I think I’d struggle to muster celebratory energy. It still bears repeating then (if only for my own tattered self esteem) to write down a few accomplishments that bring me genuine pride:
Landed a continental exclusive book distribution deal with an award-winning author
Hired two part-time employees
Got dozens of real, live artists paid
Featured press in three regional TV news programs, two radio shows, four newspapers, five podcasts and celebrity endorsements like Ken Jennings, Kenneth Field and Rebecca Solnit
Trebled last years sales, which were themselves double the sales of the year before that
Expanded my audience and customer base to become more diverse than it ever has been, with more women, queer folks and people of color finding pleasure in geography and appreciation of my mission
Created a massive social media following on at least one platform and a respectable following on several others without paying a cent in boosted ads
Elevated the role of living cartographers as artists, scientists and makers, delivering to the public a vision of creativity that is beyond their expectation
Spoke at two different State of the Map US conferences, attended ESRIUC and presented at NACIS
An eight year old boy left one day while loudly declaring that The Map Center was “way less boring than I thought it’d be.”
In my career, I’ve always had roles that were more technical in nature but I struggled to break out of the ‘technician’ box and towards customer success, project management, education, product development and strategy. In the absence of a benevolent supervisor to assign me these responsibilities, I’ve made them myself and gained tremendously by it. Whether The Map Center is thriving or not, I know that it has done extraordinary good for me in helping to discover my unexercised strengths and needs in a workplace. I can be a speaker, a leader, a salesman, a troubleshooter, a strategist, a writer, a hirer, a manager and a developer and no one had to assign those roles to me. I took them.
I possess innumerable privileges and advantages and also I’ve done a tremendous amount and largely alone. Could I have passed this opportunity up? I very nearly did. It was practically a coin flip. It would have been easy to say no. It would have been smart to say no, as many of my friends and colleagues advised me. It’s been so hard and yet I do think it has been worth it. All of it. Even the hard parts. As I’m fond of saying, when you have two good options in hand that you’re trying to choose between, I choose the one with the better story. And this is still the better story. And it’s not even over yet.
My undying gratitude for all of you interested and invested in my work enough to read this far. Your support means the world to me. It keeps me going. Thank you.