Did some shopping downtown last week, and was pleased to find that more merchants are shoveling the sidewalks in front of their stores. I did not do an exhaustive analysis, but found that all but a few storefronts had cleaned off the sidewalk. This is a big improvement over years past, when a majority of businesses did not bother to shovel the walks, the snow would get packed down into solid ice, and then the merchants would complain no one shopped downtown. If it is a choice between cracking your skull open or breaking a hip from a fall on an ice-covered sidewalk or shopping at the mall, most people will probably choose the mall.
