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Hello all! My wife and I have family in New Mexico (Clayton, Santa Fe) and have been traveling to the state for 30+ years now. It is our most favorite place on earth! On our most recent travels this summer we found a business/home for sale in Cimarron, and the wheels instantly started turning!
I come here to ask you all this: in your opinion, could a bakery/coffee shop/gift shop be successful enough in Cimarron to support our family? We certainly aren't looking to get rich, but would love to ditch the rat race for the slower pace of life in Cimarron.
I understand that the majority of our business would come from tourists, namely Philmont visitors, and would be much busier in the summer months than in the winter months. Is there quite a bit of traffic passing through town on their way to the ski resorts as well?
It should be a pretty easy ask to see the existing financials of the business. That'll give you an idea of whether you're close to profitability or whether you're orders of magnitude away from breaking even.
Running any business to profitability is hard, retail is even harder, and in the boonies, extremely hard.
Cimarron is too far from I-25 to get that traffic. It's too far from the "enchanted circle" to get that kind of tourist traffic.
In terms of ways for people to get to and from the enchanted circle, the Cimarron way ranks at the bottom in terms of shortest distance.
Sorry to say it, but grabbing mass-manufactured baked goods from warehouse clubs in Pueblo or Santa Fe is going to be a less waste of your time than making down-home-one-of-a-kind baked goods. That's probably where your ingredients would have originated in the first place.
Making it into a bed & breakfast has more potential. You can even include one-of-a-kind home-baked goods as an amenity.
Sounds like you're trying to sell yourself on the opportunity. I'd pass unless you could afford to live in otherwise poverty.
Hello all! My wife and I have family in New Mexico (Clayton, Santa Fe) and have been traveling to the state for 30+ years now.
Any help would be much appreciated!
My wife says we have been to Cimarron more than once. I do not recall, it was probably about 15 years ago when she had business trips in Denver, so we would stop at various points along the way... We live near ABQ.
There was a bakery in Cimarron in the past,
I guess you have gone to the town related web sites. If not:
Cimarron is on our to do list for our next visit to NM. Last time we visited we took Rt 152 across the Black Range. The coffee shops in Hillsboro and Kingston that were listed in the guide books were closed. The Black Range Lodge welcomed us for a morning snack when we stopped to ask if there was a coffee ship in town.
A coffee shop in Cimarron would be a good idea only if someone in the family had an outside income sufficient to provide support until the shop caught on. I would check with the old hotel (forgot the name) for business information.
The St. James Hotel is what you are probably thinking of. Agree, you'll get some Philmont traffic, perhaps a little traffic from the NRA Whittington Center in Raton, and traffic from folks taking 58/64 to Taos via Angelfire and vice versa. I would think winter might be pretty quiet.
You can use Google Street View to travel through town on US-64. There is nothing along the highway that invites a person to stop. Businesses that show on the map look like their abandoned and most have no vehicles indicating customers.
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