05/01/2020
It comes with a very heavy heart to inform you that Lone Star Gifts is officially closed. I want to thank all my customers and vendors who supported LSG for over 18 years. So many of you have been with LSG since the beginning and have become good friends and some like family to me. I want to especially thank Amy and Allen Rossing, previous owners, for the opportunity they gave me to have my own business.
I want to inform everyone that the COVID-19 pandemic DID NOT cause me to shut down. See three years ago, the owner of the building made a deal with the coffee shop next door to be my new landlord. These new landlords more than doubled my rent, plus I had to pay the owners property taxes, and I pay for all maintenance and repairs. This is called triple net leasing. All this was going on as I was going through a divorce of 33 years. I was terrified. However, with a lot of praying and talking with good friends, I decided I was going to make it work! I did make it work. My friends and my daughter Jessica told me I needed to believe in myself. LSG was thriving and I was able to tell myself, “I am going to retire from my own business in seven years”. But it was too good to be true. My landlords told me I had to be out of the building at the end of my lease which would have been this July. Then the pandemic hit and there was no way I could recoup my losses without going in debt when we could reopen for only a few months.
I looked for other places to move, however, I could not put myself in a position and take that chance of other greedy landowners doing this to me again. I found out that triple net leasing will suck small business owners of their hard-earned money. When you pay over $53,000 a year in rent, that’s more than a lot of people make in a year before taxes. The bigger Dripping Springs gets the bigger the greed as well. A very sad story!
Ok, I had my say and probably said too much, but I do feel I owed all my customers and vendors the truth as to why I am closing. Again, a heartfelt thank you to everyone who supported Lone Star Gifts. I will truly miss each and every one of you!😥😡😥
