The Under Dog, a pet supply business that was an offshoot of the 30-year-old Dapper Dog grooming shop at the northeast corner of the Bridgehampton Commons and Snake Hollow Road, closed its doors yesterday. Jennifer Ernst-Ames, the owner, said the combination of Petco’s opening at the Commons three years ago and increased online shopping had had a huge impact on the business, which was started 20 years ago by her mother, Gay Ernst of East Hampton, as the Dapper Dog grooming shop.
Mother and daughter had been selling some things out of the Dapper Dog, but “It’s tough to sell things at retail that are covered in dog fur and dander,” and so they leased one of the downstairs storefronts to expand into organic and “natural” dog food and other products. They called the business, run by Mrs. Ernst-Ames, Dapper Dog Retail.
When Donna Gregoria took over the grooming business five years ago, renaming it Donna’s Dapper Dog, the Ernst family had to change the name of their retail shop. At the suggestion of Mrs. Ernst-Ames’s stepdaughter, they renamed it The Under Dog.
The building, a former potato barn owned by Diane Brennan of Bridgehampton, has room for six or seven different businesses and predates the Bridgehampton Commons. It is the only building in the shopping complex in that category — part of it yet not part of it. There will be perhaps four businesses there once The Under Dog leaves.
Although online shopping certainly has been a big factor in the business’s decline, Mrs. Ernst-Ames said the recession of 2008 was even more responsible. “Maybe it hit this industry harder because we were sort of frivolous,” she said. Day-trippers who used to want to take home a souvenir for their dog (“Don’t you have any T-shirts?”) or buy a diamond collar no longer seemed interested.
Until 2008, every year had been more profitable than the last, she said. Afterward, people started watching their disposable cash, and the surge in online shopping was the last straw. “I’ve had a loyal following who have tried their best to help me, but numbers have stayed static,” Mrs. Ernst-Ames said. “You can’t mark them any higher and stay competitive with Petco’s pricing.”
A longtime customer came into the store recently, she related, and observed to her young daughter, “Soon there won’t be any small stores like this left, and we will be able to buy things only online.” The child’s reaction: “So?”
Concluding that the only people who care are over 50, Mrs. Ernst-Ames’s takeaway from this experience is “Please support local businesses.” She and her husband are building a ski house in New Hampshire and plan to retire there one day. When that happens, she said, she is thinking of opening a small general store, “which would be my dream.”