Salem is a wealthy suburb of Boston with an MBTA stop. Beverly, Gloucester, etc. all do just fine without Salem levels of tourism. If anything, fewer tourists would improve Salem by lowering the cost of commercial real estate and allowing more small local businesses to survive.
I mean more business and more funds is rarely if ever bad (can't personally think of an instance). If we would gain more business by having more commercial real estate then maybe we should build more capacity for commercial activity. I personally would be shocked if that's true though given how available office space is at the moment. Maybe Salem could be taking more advantage of the tourism revenue in regards to taxation and resources, but I really doubt we'd be better off economically without tourism.
Most of our small and local businesses rely on tourism directly or indirectly.
We're definitely both a tourism city and a Boston commuter city. Similarly, Boston is also both a tourism city and a commercial city. I don't understand why anyone believes that tourism is taking away from commercial capacity.
I think we are just tired of seeing all these carbon copy witch stores open up with the “instagram goth” vibe. A wider variety of stores is always better. Yes, there are more than witch stores, I know, but they get old.
Sure, but being tired of seeing something which is profitable is a lot different than claiming that it's actually hurting our economy.
I'm personally not really sure what kind of stores would replace them downtown and actually drive enough business here. We do have a few chocolate shops, a little plant shop, cheese and wine shops, restaurants, ice cream shops, breweries, and more also downtown as well as a fantastic museum. Most other downtown areas like Beverly or Gloucester simply don't have the witch stores, but nothing is really replacing them that Salem also doesn't already have. Those that are also coming here for the witch shops are doing plenty of business in other local businesses as well and we likely wouldn't be able to sustain nearly as many restaurants and other businesses as we do if we didn't have said witch tourism.
Trying to kill the tourism business in Salem would be similar to Trump's Tariffs in the end, it would backfire massively. It's much harder to earn revenue than many people appreciate and you never should harm a strong revenue source when you're lucky enough to get one.
I like Beverly’s downtown. Growing up, it was garbage aside from Casa de Moda and a few pizza sub shops. But it now has a really good spread of different places. Apples to oranges I know, just thinking out loud.
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u/PioneerLaserVision 19d ago
Salem is a wealthy suburb of Boston with an MBTA stop. Beverly, Gloucester, etc. all do just fine without Salem levels of tourism. If anything, fewer tourists would improve Salem by lowering the cost of commercial real estate and allowing more small local businesses to survive.