Inside Sweet Dreams Bakery and Café the air smells of warm cupcakes. Rows of cookies, cakes decorated with bright yellow, icing daffodils, and sweet breads line the small, refrigerated display case next to the cash register. The walls are cozily cluttered and a handful of tables and chairs dot the tiled floor landscape.

In the kitchen, the staff bustles about. Yvonne Price, who co-owns the bakery with her sister, Robbin Monteith, comes out from behind the counter, hair upswept, blue shirt slightly damp and hands smelling of dishwater. Sitting at one of the bakery’s tables with her arms outstretched, palms down, she smiles and casts a quick sidelong glance out the window at the cars on N.C. 107 zooming by.

At a little past 3 p.m. on a Wednesday — a time some might think popular for a pick-me-up cup of coffee and sweet treat to go — the bakery is empty. The sisters have advertised — radio, newspapers, special sections, billboards — but nothing seems to be working. The bakery, located about a quarter-mile north of Sylva’s Super Wal-Mart, is David. Wal-Mart is Goliath. And this time Goliath is winning.

“They’re a huge competition for us,” Price said. “All I can offer someone when they come in here is service.”

The bakery, started as a labor of love between two sisters, is up for sale. When it sells — if it sells — the sisters have other jobs lined up. Price will go back to the insurance business. Monteith most likely will go to work with her husband, a plumber. The three students the bakery employs part time will be without work.

The job losses are relatively small in the grand scheme of things. Sweet Dreams can’t offer any benefits. Hours are long, profits are low. But losing the business isn’t just a matter of jobs. It’s a matter of character, and of a small town being swallowed by corporate America, of the metamorphosis into Anytown, U.S.A.

“The small business is the flavor of your town,” Price said.

Hidden Bonuses

In the past few months, Sylva has seen chain stores appear on the horizon like renegade sheep slowly wandering across the hillside, clustering together to form a herd — Advance Auto Parts, Eckerds, and now Lowe’s. Meanwhile, rumors of Cracker Barrel, Hampton Inn, Home Depot, Shoney’s, and Walgreen’s abound. These rumors have local storeowners worried.

“When Wal-Mart went in they put a lot of small businesses out of business,” said Laurie Forrest, who co-owns Smoky Mountain Video along with her husband, John.

The fear is that new chain stores will do the same within their markets. However, economic development officials say this isn’t always the case, that chain stores have their benefits.

“I don’t know that they’ll put anybody out of business and number two, they’re going to increase the tax base,” said Mark Owen, Director of Communication and Research with the regional economic development group AdvantageWest.

AdvantageWest doesn’t typically deal in retail — funds are directed to 10 select fields including health care, recreation and tourism and communications and internet technologies. However, Owen said the development equation is not one necessarily of bringing in new stores that put old ones out of business, but of keeping customers from going outside their town to shop.

For example, Sylva is slated to get a new Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse at the intersection of N.C. 107 and 116. The store shouldn’t pose a threat to local building suppliers, as the town already is sandwiched between a Lowe’s in Franklin and one in Waynesville, Owens said.

People who live in town and choose to drive to Lowe’s — rather than shopping at one of the locally owned hardware and home supply stores — will just keep on doing so, but now their tax dollars with remain in their home county, said Tom Stovall, owner of Sylva-based Southern Lumber Co. And Lowe’s enormous popularity goes hand-in-hand with the booming renovation trend, as shows like The Learning Channel’s Trading Spaces have made it cool for women — the primary shoppers in a household — to own a drill, no matter where it’s from.

“Retail’s not always a zero sum game,” Owen said.

Convenience, quality and cost

Still dressed in scrubs, Danny Pyatt browsed the aisles at Lowe’s in Franklin at a quarter ‘til five last Friday pushing a cartful of fertilizer, pausing to examine a new chainsaw blade.

An X-ray technician at Angel Medical Center, Pyatt had just gotten off work. His shopping options were limited. K-Mart and Wal-Mart didn’t have what he needed. The locally based Nantahala Lumber Co. closed at 5 p.m.

“They have what I need here — you usually don’t have to go three or four places,” Pyatt said of Lowe’s.

The hours, the store’s variety, and the cheaper prices all drew Pyatt in. These factors make it hard for smaller, local stores to compete. They may not have the staff to stay open late, or offer the assortment of goods, as it’s cheaper to buy a lot of one item than a few of many different items.

And when chain stores are in the mix, their bulk purchases aren’t made just for one store but for whole company. Think of it as a baker’s dozen and then some.

“I’m not sure that service and convenience is enough,” said Price, co-owner of Sweet Dreams.

The bakery offers many of the same wedding cake toppers as their major competitor, Wal-Mart, but charges more because the store’s overhead is higher. Spending more for a cake made from scratch at a locally owned store, and for a topper that could be gotten for less a quarter mile up the road, just isn’t worth it to some, Price said.

“I’m not 100 percent sure you can combat that,” she said.

At Smoky Mountain Video, store owners work around what they call a misconception that the chain rental store near Wal-Mart offers movies for less by offering something different. The store carries videos that are required viewing for some of Western Carolina University’s courses and many foreign films, Forrest said.

In addition, workers know their renters by name and participate in community events by sponsoring Little League teams and helping with fundraisers. Also, the video store can offer a level of personalized service that corporate policies might now allow, a fact evidenced by one WCU student’s failure to return a copy of “Pirates of the Caribbean” he rented — in August.

The student had racked up a past due bill just shy of $1,000. When store owners couldn’t track him down, they sent a letter to his mom. She called her son. Not remembering having rented “Pirates of the Caribbean” and somewhat surprised at the amount of his bill, he came in to see what was the matter.

As for the bill? He paid the $19.95 plus tax to replace the movie and was told the $1,000 in late charges most likely would be lessened and some form of payment plan created.

Kel-Save, a pharmacy and general merchandise store in Sylva owned by long-time pharmacist Bob Kelley, has been bringing in customers for years, in part because of the level of service.

“We know what they want before they even ask for it, at least I do, because they smoke cigarettes every day,” said Jessica Hawes, a cashier and a senior at Smoky Mountain High School.

But the store also appears to have beaten its corporate competitors at their own game.

“I called around everywhere and this was the cheapest,” said Bryson City resident Sue Mann.

Mann began coming to Kel-Save six years ago when her mother was ill. Her mother has since passed on, but Mann and her husband, Bill, continue to make the nearly half-hour long trip to the pharmacy to purchase prescription medicine.

Now, combating the recent arrival of an Eckerd drug store located just a stone’s throw away — literally one can drive out Kel-Save’s back exit, cross a two-lane road and be in Eckerds’ parking lot — Kelley has erected a new display sign along N.C. 107. The sign, with its red, moving type, extols the pharmacy’s virtues — cheaper prices — along with the time and temperature.

9-to-5, give or take

Working Mother Magazine recently released a list of 2004’s Top 10 places to work. The list is based on various factors including a company’s culture, family-friendly policies and compensation.

Three issues weighed heavily this year: “flexible scheduling, because it is essential for working mothers; child-care options, because without them parents can’t work; and time off for new parents, because it is critical to be able to stay home with newborns without suffering professionally.”

Number of companies on the list with offices in Haywood, Jackson, Macon and Swain counties? Two.

Prudential Financial Inc. and Wachovia came in at numbers eight and 10 on the list respectively, mostly for their flexible schedules.

The carrier service UPS was featured in an article about best jobs for recent graduates that appeared in a recent issue of Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, as the company offered tuition compensation, flexible work schedules and benefits, even for part timers.

Lowe’s offers the same benefits to full-time store workers as to its corporate workers.

These benefits are often out of reach to small, local companies. The law of averages — and sordid health histories — may make a group policy more expensive for one worker than carrying their own. The simple act of a corporate company coming in and providing more jobs at a higher wage may make it hard for mom and pop style operations to compete, having to downsize to pay one worker what they would have paid two.

Pyatt, the X-ray technician, said benefits are a big draw. If forced to choose between having a job he liked more or having a job with benefits, Pyatt said the choice was clear.

“I’d have to go for the benefits,” he said.

Price didn’t see corporate retailers as the main source of the community’s benefit pool and consequent drain on the work force.

“Around here if they want benefits you’ve already lost them to Harrah’s (casino) or the university,” she said.

However, jobs that fit a community’s needs may not always be the jobs that carry the best benefits.

“Certain jobs may not be the best job in the world, but it targets a demographic that needs the jobs,” said Ken Mills, Swain County’s economic development director.

Jobs must match up with a community’s workforce, both in size and in education.

“If you have a manufacturing workforce, you can’t go out and recruit biotech,” said AdvantageWest’s Owen.

And in terms of recruiting, size does matter. In Swain County the workforce numbers 7,000. The total population, which varies seasonally, is just over 13,000. About 15 years ago, Swain County commissioners courted Wal-Mart with the hopes of brining in a new store.

“We were told that we were too big in the summer for a small store, and too small in the winter for a big store,” Mills said.

As a result, Swain County got nothing. The new store was located in Sylva.

On the plus side, Swain County fosters an entrepreneurial spirit. On the minus side, the county — the smallest county in the state in terms of privately owned land — is missing out on sales tax dollars that could have been used for infrastructure improvements.

“The main issue right now is we’re looking hard to get the broadband infrastructure,” Mills said. “That would allow us to market better businesses, better jobs.”

The quality of the job offered by a particular company is a factor that plays in to whether communities are willing to provide incentives to bring in that company, Mills said.

“We do consider what are the full packages, what are people getting,” he said.

Incentives — though some smaller companies may think them unfair — are not always a matter of cutting a deal with the devil.

“You’re not necessarily wrong in providing incentives,” Mills said. “You’re wrong if you don’t require some sort of collateral.”

For example, communities may elect to enact an incentives agreement that uses bonuses for every goal the incoming company achieves — for each job created, a community will provide X; for a certain percentage of sales, a community will give back X.

The state model relies on an increased tax base.

“You can look at it as — would the state rather have 100 percent of nothing, or 90 percent of a $1 million tax base,” Owen said.