LEARNING FROM STAPLES

The computer business model for Staples in the early ’90s made places such as Portland the farthest profitable reach into rural America for the office supply store. But looking for areas in which to grow since the first Staples opened in Boston in 1986, founder Tom Stemberg took a risk on Bangor in 1994 – and changed the way the company and many other retailers viewed the country.

Mr. Stemberg was in Bangor recently, visiting two of the company’s 1,400 stores and, more importantly, encouraging other entrepreneurs through what he calls a give-back tour, begun here with checks totaling $10,000 to BanAir Corp.’s International Enterprise Center, which helps find and lease space for new businesses. In a talk before presenting the award, Mr. Stemberg recounted the company’s reluctance to depart from its usual urban environment but was finally persuaded that if a lease could be negotiated favorably the store might be marginally successful – “a $4 million store” by his estimation at the time, meaning $4 million in annual sales. It is now a $10 million store, with a second one in the city that is also thriving.

What the computer model may have missed was the willingness of people living a couple of hours away to drive to a service center such as Bangor to shop, making the city feel like a more-populated place. It is an understandable oversight, but what should be of interest to Bangor is that there may remain other misperceptions about the region wrongly telling company decision-makers that the city is a poor risk. And given that the superstore category, which includes Staples, has been studied extensively over the last decade, chances are greater that misperceptions exist in the small and start-up firms, especially when skewed announcements from groups like the Small Business Survival Committee describe the tax system inaccurately, as it did again last month.

Staples now has dozens of stores in rural regions across the country, “and we never would have done that if it hadn’t been for Bangor, Maine,” according to Mr. Stemberg. Bangor can take two ideas from this comment. First, that the city can use it to tell other businesses about the unexpected opportunities that Staples found.

Second, the comment suggests that Bangor is not as desperate a place as it sometimes views itself, so it may be able to target development that best suits what it wants to become, attracting the sort of businesses that will make it a more desirable place to live and work. Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy, observed in a Wall Street Journal commentary recently that companies are moving out of Manhattan and into less developed areas because technology allows them to and terrorism encourages them to. The latter is not merely fear; it is cost – of physical security, communications and insurance. Bangor is like a lot of places in not having those high costs but it and the rest of Maine are unusual in that they have a highly skilled work force not within their borders but spread out across the country and eager to return home – if only there was the availability of new high-quality work. It is an important resource, virtually untapped and is not on anyone’s computer model.

Mr. Stemberg’s donations to the International Enterprise Center were generous and appreciated. But his comments could turn out to be even more valuable.