JEN SCHMIDT/NEVADA APPEAL
While sitting at one of the tables inside the Chinese restaurant he and his wife Lily recently opened, James Gotchy pulls out a slip of paper tucked inside a folder.
"We used to sit over in the shoe store and we used to write down the reasons why a restaurant would be better than a retail shoe store," said Gotchy, who owned and operated Gotchy Family Shoes for almost three decades, until he closed it a year ago. "We came up with about 17 reasons, and some of them are very big reasons."
He looks down the list and chooses his favorites:
"When people come into the restaurant they always buy the lunch, but in a retail store they shop around and try on things and then they don't buy them," he said. "No. 2 , the Internet can't compete with us."
The Gotchys, married six years, opened Lilys China Bistro earlier this month after spending a year planning their new restaurant, which occupies the former Long John Silvers at 1280 S. Carson St. He plans the business side of things. She runs the kitchen.
Gotchy's father, Lloyd, opened the family's first shoe store in Reno in 1938. They opened their Carson City store in 1981 and moved it to the Carson Mall in 1984. The business peaked in 1986 with $1.2 million in sales when they had two other stores in Reno, he said.
"And then that's when Nike came on the scene and that's when everybody started wearing sweatpants and athletic shoes," Gotchy said. "That's when people stopped dressing up. That's when it started to drop off."
Eventually, they closed their Reno stores, but held onto the location in the Carson Mall until last year when Gotchy finally decided to close it. He said it just became unfeasible to run a small, brick-and-mortar shoe business and still expect to make money. So he and his wife decided to pursue her long-time dream of opening a restaurant.
They spent months searching for a building to house their restaurant, which offers traditional Chinese fare, such as Mongolian beef, and eventually sushi. And being in a building that used to house a fast-food restaurant, there's also a drive-through window.
James Gotchy continues to go over his list of reasons for opening a restaurant over running a shoe store: Harder for customers to steal merchandise, inventory that doesn't go out of style.
He pauses, then smiles.
"We never miss a sale in here because we don't have a size," he said.