Good downtown effort

Congrats are in order for the Downtown Monroe Business Network for trying to keep their places open longer on a coordinated basis. Anyone who's had a small business downtown understands how hard that is to do. It's almost as bad as staffing a booth at the Monroe County Fair -- you have to spread yourself and your workers even thinner.
The idea is to capture some of the people who might come to downtown restaurants for th e Blues series events.
There were some heavier crowds downtown this past week but the point is that the downtown merchants are trying to coordinate things. It's not a bad idea since a lot of people work during the day and shop at night or on weekends.
It's always a risk to do these things and hopefully it will pay off for the downtown stores. I'm not sure who's idea it was, but at least it an effort worth trying.
Gabe Martin of Martin's Shoe House heads up the downtown group. If anybody knows what will or won't work downtown, it should be him since his family's store has been downtown since the dinosaurs roamed the earth.
Good luck to the group and if anybody hasn't been downtown on a Thursday night, they should try it.
Try supporting our small downtown merchants for a change, you might be pleasantly surprised.