The Christmas Present Test

This article was originally published on Strong Towns member Michael Natelli’s Substack, Hope in Cities. It is shared here with permission.

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(Source: Eugene Zhyvchik/Unsplash.)

There's no one metric that can fully measure what makes a great city. But as we enter the holiday season, one question comes pretty close:

"How easy is it to Christmas shop in your city?"

Hear me out.

What if your city was the greatest place in the country to buy a Christmas present? What would have to be true to make that a reality?

Let's break it down into two pieces: the gifts, and the shopping experience.

The Gifts

Gift Cards

There is a wide spectrum when it comes to the quality of gift card giving. Some are very much a phoning-it-in confession: "I had no clue what to get you." But others can be an incredibly thoughtful way to treat someone to an experience (dinner at a great local restaurant, a high-end haircut, etc.) they couldn't otherwise afford.

If you were to get someone a gift card to use in your city, what would you get them? Are you sending them to Best Buy? Or is there somewhere unique or worthwhile you can send them?

Don't sleep on your city's "gift card infrastructure." It's a great barometer for the experiential facet of your local economy.

Physical Gifts

Let's quickly dispel a myth: You don't need five different shops on Main Street that sell a variation of shirts with your town name on them to have a great local retail scene.

There's nothing wrong with a little local pride. In fact, it's a great thing! But great local economies evolve beyond dependency on live-in and out-of-town tourism-focused retail (shirts, prints, and anything else built around "town name printed on thing").

You need two things to find a great Christmas gift: uniqueness of gifts and diversity of options.

To assess the state of the first pillar, ask the question, "What can I buy here that I couldn't buy somewhere else?" And don't overcomplicate your answer. For example, sure, you can buy baked goods anywhere, but if there's a great bakery in town known for some signature item(s), that absolutely counts.

To assess the state of the second pillar, ask the question, "Do I have to jam my gift recipient into my available choices, or is there truly something here for everyone?"

Everyone's found themselves out shopping for that hard-to-buy-for relative and making up some story as to why the random item from the Target Bullseye section is truly the best thing you could ever give them. "They'd love a No. 2 pencil with a puppy on it. They wanted to be an author when they were a kid! And they had a dog! A pencil with a dog on it! A pen-dog! A dog-cil? Yes. This is perfect."

If even dedicated gift-givers are facing these trials in your city, it probably lacks a strong local retail scene.

Great Christmas shopping cities have diverse local economies. Going all-in to subsidize the Walmart or auto plant doesn't do you any favors at Christmas time (or any other time of year, for that matter). But making resources and investment available to local entrepreneurs across all industries and verticals is how you create streets filled with little shops of all kinds with something for everyone on your list.

(Source: Hert Niks/Unsplash.)

The Shopping Experience

We've covered the actual gifts, but the shopping experience is just as important.

For all the reasonable cynicism we have about American suburbia, some of my most hopeful moments for what we can turn it into come from Christmas time at the mall.

This time of year, with Mariah Carey playing on the PA system (and me singing along just softly enough for no one to notice), vendors flood the walkway medians on both floors of our local mall. Artists display incredible paintings, drawings, and handcrafted jewelry; local entrepreneurs have tables set out to display gadgets and gizmos.

It's not quite a true Christmas market, but it's a lot closer than your typical mall day walking past PacSun and Hollister to remind yourself of your eighth-grade glory days. And involving local artists and entrepreneurs in this way is a great first step for cities looking to step up their holiday shopping game (and local economy, in general).

But when you've really made it as a Christmas Shopping City (CSC ®), the action doesn't happen at the mall. It happens in the little shops in the charming first-floor stores, and it happens in grand Christmas markets with items of all kinds for the finding.

Great Christmas Shopping Cities are also naturally great cities. The types of places that facilitate great Christmas shopping are only made possible through the kind of urban design and placemaking that facilitates thriving places year round.

And as we continue to look for the best possible language to tell the story of what's possible in our own cities, what better north star could we ask for?

What city doesn't want to be the greatest place in the country to buy a Christmas present?

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