Brown: As once-giant Joann Fabrics shutters its doors, the DIYers must sew our economy back together

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“I feel like I’m stealing,” gushed a woman leaving the store.

She didn’t know us, but she had to tell someone. Her cart overflowed with sparkly ribbon and plastic Christmas foliage. My son and I understood what she meant. My wife sent us out to the car to get more bags because the situation had gotten out of control.

This was the scene on April 26, the day the Joann Fabrics store in Hibbing, Minn., closed forever. By the end of May, the company will shutter all its nearly 800 stores across the country.

This particular store opened in an Iron Range mall around the time I was born. It became our first stop each time my seamstress mom took my sisters and me to town. But the retail universe that put it here has since been sucked into a black hole. This feeding frenzy of sequins and costume jewelry was a bittersweet funeral for something that wasn’t coming back.

Of course, you can still buy fabric and craft supplies from other places. In some towns, locally owned stores offer an alternative to the sleek predictability of corporate chains. Other brands like Hobby Lobby and Michaels stand to gain where they’ve already staked a claim. Meantime, online retailers are always ready to gobble up more of the market share.

But for a lot of people around Minnesota, losing Joann’s means less availability of DIY sewing and crafting supplies. Many can’t imagine ordering something online that you normally see and touch before buying. My mother has taken to scavenging fabric from cheap clothing and blankets.

On the final day of the Hibbing Joann’s, most shelves were bare. Two months of discounts slowly depleted the most popular items. On the last day, the sales became fantastical. Up to 90% off most items, plus 50% off your order. The fabric was gone by this point, but many curiosities remained. I snatched an armful of 15-cent ceramic planting pots while my wife stocked up on yarn.

My irony-loving teenage son and I spent some time staring at a dozen quirky decorative frogs. They didn’t quite look like frogs, but at their current price they were virtually free. “You want a frog?” I asked him. He thought for a while before politely declining. I got more pots instead.

Frankly, we were doing them a favor. Crews rushed to pull out metal shelves as people emptied the last stock. A chorus of power drills added gravity to the scene, occasionally interrupted by the smash of disassembled steel on the floor.

For the unseen owners of Joann’s, this last day had nothing to do with profit and everything to do with avoiding next month’s rent. Like many retailers, Joann’s grew through the collapse of downtowns and the rise of malls, then survived the collapse of malls with a lifeline from a private equity firm. But, in a symbolic twist, the very private equity firm that helped Joann organize its last expansion 11 years ago bought the now troubled asset to liquidate it.

A March 2 analysis by Chris Westfall in Forbes suggests that the problems facing chains like Joann aren’t just related to declining brick-and-mortar retail trends. Rather, big hedge funds are less patient with debt, choosing to scrap acquisitions rather than run them. He cites a Coresight report that about 15,000 stores might close in the United States this year.

It’s the George Bailey problem. On paper, they’re worth more dead than alive. But just like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” this calculation omits an important human factor. Humans need to congregate and create, or we become unhappy drones. Unfortunately, Hollywood got one thing wrong: Mr. Potter still runs the economy.

It’s not stealing. But for communities watching their retail economy collapse, it sure feels like stealing.

For the many rural craftspeople in my social circles, the loss of Joann stores in Hibbing, Bemidji and Duluth represents a bad blow.

And yet, this is an instance where DIYers can show us the way. If mending a beloved piece of clothing is better than throwing it out, perhaps we could say the same for the stores that sell fabric, thread or anything else.

We’re entering the do-it-yourself economy. It won’t be as shiny, pretty or easy as what we’ve just fumbled away, but the crafty and resilient among us will survive. Crisis breeds opportunity, and for those who seek to keep small town economies going, now is your time to spin gold from this mountain of straw. Neither Wall Street nor Washington seems to have much to offer.