>
> For some reason, this reminded me of the "travelling pub" story I heard on my last trip up north. You see, back in the old days, there was this pub building on the west coast of Northland (in New Zealand, for those who don't know me). This was at the time when there was a "gold rush" type thing up there for kauri gum - fossilized lumps of sap from prehistoric forests of kauri trees, which was quite a valuable commodity. People went rushing up to the gumdigging areas to dig it out of the mud and get rich quick, although not as quick as they got tired and muddy.
> So there was the pub, on the rapidly emptying west coast, and there were the gumdiggers, on the east coast. What to do? Shut down the pub, move east and build a new one? Nah. They dug the whole building off its foundations, put wheels on it, hitched up as many horses or bullocks as it took, and off they went.
> It took a while to get there so they took all the booze with them, and opened for business every night wherever they camped. The travelling pub's triumphant final resting place can be seen on the east coast today, and it's probably even more deserted now than it was before they moved it. Oh well. Gold and kauri gum takes a *long* time to grow back once you've dug it all. Maybe they should load up again and haul it down to Auckland. At least there's a road now.
>
> Brunnen-"the days when men were real men, women were real women, but there was so much mud on both of 'em you probably couldn't tell the difference"G


For some reason, your story reminded me of this story.

When we first moved to Lenoir City, there was a small five and dime store down on Broadway. Business was bad. The owners, an older couple, had bearly been able to stay in business for a couple of years, so they decided to pack it in, hang it up, thrown in the towel, call it quits, etc.
They slapped a big "Going Out of Business" sign on one show window and "Everything 25% Off" on the other.

You guessed it. Business boomed. They were making less on each sale, but there were so many more customers! By mid-November, the place was looking kind of bare and the Christmas buying frenzy was in full swing, so they bought some more merchandise and decided to close up at the end of December. When word got out that they had new stuff at bargain prices, business took another spurt. They kept restocking and pushing the closing ahead a few weeks at a time.

Finally, after almost three years, the signs on the windows were badly faded and the owners were slightly rich. So they closed up and bought a house in Florida.

I just love happy endings.
Howard