Outside the RNC, small Milwaukee businesses and their regulars tried to salvage a sluggish week
MILWAUKEE — Jay Nelson was standing outside the grocery store he manages in downtown Milwaukee when one of his regular customers stopped by on her daily walk through the neighborhood.
“I’ve been telling people to come and buy even just a bottle of wine,” she said, holding out her arms. “I hope it helps.”
Nelson gave her a hug and said they could use all the help they could get.
The store he ran for nearly a decade, Downtown Market & Smoke Shop was one of many businesses closed off by high metal fences in 2024 Republican National Conventiona vast area that paralyzed parts of the city center for more than a week.
For small businesses like Downtown Market, the RNC failed to deliver a decisive victory, instead hampering sales despite earlier promises that it would to give an economic boost.
“I want you to take all your money to Milwaukee, spend it that week and leave it in Milwaukee,” Mayor Cavalier Johnson said two years ago at the RNC summer meeting, where it was announced that the city would host the GOP national convention.
But Samir Saddique, owner of Downtown Market and the adjacent Avenue Liquor, said the convention achieved “a whole lot of nothing.” Traffic and sales plummeted after the fence went up in front of the stores. By Thursday, the last day of the RNC, the liquor store had only generated 10% of its usual sales, he said.
“We are cut off from the rest of the world,” Saddique said.
Claire Koenig, a spokesperson for Visit Milwaukee, which promotes the city as a tourist destination, said it will likely take three months to compile the economic impact reports.
Across the Milwaukee River, which marked the eastern boundary of the RNC’s secure zone, only one seat was occupied at the bar at Elwood’s Liquor & Visit during their Wednesday happy hour, a night that typically sees a crowd at the red bar near the Fiserv Forum, where the convention’s main stage was located.
“Everyone was promised this was going to be a huge money maker for businesses,” said bar manager Sam Chung, 30. “So it’s strange to see how much it has actually killed business for a lot of people outside the perimeter.”
Even their most loyal customers didn’t come by this week, Chung said.
“They don’t want to come here at all because it’s obviously a mess to get here,” she said, adding that she thought “a lot of it is because a lot of our regulars are Democrats.”
Milwaukee is the deepest blue city in wisconsinan important swing state.
Adam Buker, a 21-year-old barista at a coffee shop near one of the convention’s exits, which leads visitors to an open street, said he had been playing music by gay artists all week as his own protest.
Still, the door at Canary Coffee Bar kept swinging open.
“It has 100 percent to do with our location,” Buker said Thursday as he packed espresso coffee for a cortado, with a Frank Ocean song playing in the background.
Although outside the security zone, the cafe’s glass storefront and buttery-yellow sidewalk seating weren’t obstructed by fencing like Saddique’s liquor and convenience stores. Nor did RNC attendees have to cross the river to get to the coffee shop, unlike Elwood’s.
Buker said he spent his tips at a number of struggling bars around the convention center after the closure this week.
“From one service provider to another,” he said. “Spread the love.”
As Buker’s last shift during RNC week wound down Thursday night, a last-minute party had just begun outside Saddique’s convenience store. Saddique and Nelson, the manager, hoped that fancy tacos and iced green tea poured from orange coolers would lure customers into the stores that have been open for more than 20 years and have survived a recession and a global pandemic.
Debra Lampe-Revolinski, who has lived in the building next to Saddique’s business for 15 years, said she came up with the idea for the party earlier this week when she realized the expected sales growth for her friends wouldn’t materialize.
She knew Saddique and Nelson had gone to great lengths to prepare for the RNC, having watched them work hard for weeks as they remodeled parts of the stores, she said.
“And then there was just this exodus because the shops were blocked by these high metal fences,” she said. “It was so unattractive.”
By the time Trump took the stage Thursday to formally accept the GOP nomination, Lampe-Revolinski said the party, originally intended to drum up business, had instead turned into a celebration of surviving the week.
“This week has actually made our little community on this block stronger so that they can support their local businesses,” she said.
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Associated Press writer Todd Richmond contributed from Madison, Wisconsin.