SHOPPING GETS FESTIVE IN SOCIABLE TRAVERSE CITY

 TRAVERSE CITY, MI – Shopping should always be an adventure. But in this laid-back Michigan resort town, it can easily include an impromptu concert, an encounter with a wisecracking juggler or a ride in a vintage fire engine.

Those are fairly common elements in Friday Night Live, the “community block party” held in the downtown business district in late summer.  Every Friday evening from mid-July until the end of August, the city closes two blocks of Front Street to auto traffic, transforming it into a colorful bazaar of music, entertainment, food vendors and children’s games, while downtown merchants display their wares in impromptu booths.

“It started 19 years ago, back when downtown was kind of dead on Fridays, but now it’s just part of the whole Traverse City experience,” says Colleen Paveglio of the Downtown Traverse City Association, which coordinates Friday Night Live and a wide array of similar events throughout the year.

Most of Traverse City’s neighboring towns and villages have discovered the same thing. Events and celebrations that were originally designed to lure shoppers into local stores and restaurants, particularly in the evenings and in the off-season, have quickly become regular fixtures in the local social calendar.

Consider, for instance, Traverse City’s October Halloween Walk, when downtown stores open their doors to trick-or-treating little ghosts and goblins and their parents. The event is a complete “business-killer,” says Paveglio, since everyone is having too much fun to shop – but people enjoy it so much that they’d never dream of canceling it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t still have fun shopping for great deals at these fun events. You may just have to do it while balancing a glass of wine, munching a slice of cherry pie, or having your hair braided.

If your summertime Fridays are too busy, you can head to the scenic village of Alden on Torch Lake for their Thursday Night Evening Stroll, or drive to the neighboring village of Bellaire for their Wednesday night downtown concert series. (By the way, August seems to be the month for sidewalk sales as merchants in Traverse City, Leland and Bellaire offer deep discounts on the current year’s merchandise to make way for new inventory.)

Art fairs have long been a mainstay of the retail scene in artsy northern Michigan. The annual August art fair in Suttons Bay and the Traverse Bay Outdoor Art Fair and Old Town Arts & Crafts Fair in Traverse City are among the oldest and most competitive in the Midwest. (They’ve been joined by similar summer fairs in Leland and Elk Rapids.) A more recent, and increasingly popular phenomenon are “art walks” where shoppers are encouraged to wander from store to gallery to studio, viewing artworks and meeting artists while sampling hors d’oeuvres and sipping wine.

Downtown Traverse City holds two of these popular evenings, one in spring, the other in autumn. Suttons Bay also has two art walks – a “summer solstice” version in late June and a “fall finale” in October. Elk Rapids makes do with a single fall art walk, a day-long event they call Art Beat.

In fact, fall seems to be a favorite time for shopping events. The first one seems to be in Bellaire, which holds its annual Harvest Festival & Scarecrow Extravaganza each year in late September. (Downtown businesses compete to create “signature scarecrows” that make a statement about them, and there are a good many discounts and competitions.)

Not far behind is Traverse City’s Fall Festive Sale & Happy Apple Days, held on the first Saturday in October, when local merchants traditionally leave out bushels of apples to share with their customers

But the thickest clustering of shopping specials takes place later in the year, as autumn moves inexorably into winter. In mid-November downtown Traverse City holds its annual Shop Your Community Day, in which retailers donate 15 percent of their sales to the charity of the customer’s choice, and almost immediately there are holiday shopping festivities in the surrounding villages.

Suttons Bay holds an annual Holiday Open House, where shops and businesses express thanks to their customers for their patronage with an afternoon of refreshments and entertainment, while Glen Arbor and Leland hold “pajama party” sales where shoppers can take advantage of special bargains if they happen to be wearing their pajamas.

By December, it’s hard to find a weekend without some event bringing crowds of shoppers into downtown Traverse City. Some are aimed at families with kids (Santa’s arrival and the community sing-along at the town Christmas tree) but the most popular are late-night shopping sprees: a Ladies Night, followed by a Midnight Madness Sale and a Men’s Night, all featuring entertainment, food and drink specials in addition to the usual in-store sales.