Chloe Yu was at a Rage City Vintage clothing swap, digging through piles of shirts and dresses, purses and shoes and pants.
She held up a skirt. She’ll wear it as a strapless dress, she said, hike it up and add a belt or waist chains.
Yu’s been to a bunch of events at Rage City. It’s a place she always feels welcome. That’s something she really values, she said, as a queer person still discovering aspects of her sexual identity.
“During a time where we felt like it was us against the world, coming here, we could always kind of leave behind our worries and responsibilities at the door and just be ourselves,” she said.
Now, that haven is disappearing. Rage City Vintage is closing its doors after a significant drop in sales, a reminder that small, community-minded businesses like this one can be the first to falter in an economic downturn. To customers, the loss feels personal — the end of a place that offers belonging as much as clothing. To its owners, it’s the end of a dream: to build a business that supports local artists and fosters community.
“In spite of the fact that all we want to do is give love to the community and be a space for people, we get to close instead,” co-owner Mac Tubbs said. “That's just hot garbage. It's so frustrating.”
Tight margins, tight wallets
Tubbs said it’s hard to talk about the closure.
She and her co-owner Emma Hill set out to build a space for all kinds of people who don’t always feel safe elsewhere. It’s a space for people to find themselves, find friends, figure out how to dress and, sometimes, how to be a person comfortable in the world.
“The goal of any interaction that we have with any person walking in here is to make them feel better than they did when they were outside our doors,” she said.
It seems to have worked. Hills said event attendance is great, so is social media engagement. There are lots of people coming through the store. The problem is, all that community doesn’t add up to dollars. A tight margin was already built into the business model. Then sales dropped this year by roughly 40% compared to last year, Hill said.
The store will close Dec. 24.
To understand what’s behind this kind of drop in spending, economists say it’s important to zoom out.
A recent report shows Alaska’s economy is treading water, said Kevin Berry, who heads the economics department at the University of Alaska Anchorage.
Nationally, people on the lower end of the economic spectrum are spending less. That’s coupled with the effects of the recent government shutdown and increased prices due to tariffs, Berry said.
“One of the natural responses people have is to start precautionarily saving, to put away a little bit more, not go out quite as much, maybe not buy a vintage T-shirt as frequently,” he said.
When people pull back, that often really affects small, local businesses. That’s important for a couple reasons, he said: Small businesses add character to communities and they serve as a kind of test case — trying out new things, exploring whether there’s a demand.
“I think that dynamism is really important for an economy like Anchorage, where part of what we're selling to potential people who would visit or move here is that it's a unique and fun and interesting place to live,” he said.
‘I regret nothing’
Hill said the store is really a community space trying to survive as a retail space.
“We have really fun events,” she said. “We have an amazing community, and we get these sweet compliments and comments all the time about how people feel so safe and seen. And because of all of that, I regret nothing.”
Hill said for groups that have been marginalized, like queer communities, there’s so much value in finding your people to lean on. But it doesn’t stop there, she said. Rage City Vintage was also meant to serve as an umbrella for even smaller businesses selling their merchandise on consignment. More than 200 vendors have sold at the shop over the last few years. She said part of the mission was to make as many small businesses as much money as possible.
Plus, Rage City provided a sober place to get together. That’s important to Hill after she struggled to find alcohol-free spaces when she stopped drinking nearly a decade ago. And the events are family-friendly. Kids of all ages regularly perform at open mic nights.
“In this space, it's so much more than just a space for queerness, it's a space for vulnerability and where that's not just accepted, it's celebrated,” she said.
That space for vulnerability has been really valuable for Chloey Cavanaugh. She was dropping off clothes at the swap and said it has felt healing to spend time in the store, playing around with her style.
“It was really hard to express myself through clothing for a long time, even just wearing a baseball hat felt scary at the time as a queer kid who hadn't come out,” she said.
But Hill and Tubbs helped her explore her androgyny, hyping her up to try on things she wouldn’t have felt comfortable in before.
Hill said that work, of supporting each other and building community, will go on, even without the store.
“It's gonna still be community focused,” she said. “It's still gonna be us showing up for this amazing community that we call home in whatever way that we can.”
They’re just not quite sure what that looks like yet.
