I get a lot of visitors to this blog from a post I wrote last year titled “Don’t Blame the Big Guys”. The story was about how “retail Lyndale Garden Center, once a year-round business, will close its Richfield, MN, store Monday with plans to reopen next spring as a seasonal operation. While spring sales were strong again this year, competition from the boxes has hurt overall sales, making it no longer feasible to operate year round, Owner Dallas Schwandt says.”

What happened since is Lyndale Garden Center closed. Not just because of competition from Home Depot. I still get comments on this post from disgruntled ex-employees and people wondering what’s up. Just today I received a comment from someone asking “Does anyone know when/if they are going to re-open? We have a gift card to use there, did not realize they were closing.”

Google “Lyndale Garden Center” and up pops seven entries talking as if the store still exists. The eighth is my blog with the above post. It’s the first entry that mentions the troubles and therefore is a place for venting and questions.

There is still a domain address for Lyndale, but it leads to a domain service. How hard would it be for Lyndale’s ex-owners to post a short page explaining the situation? I would assume the past owners may want to start another project and having my post with some interesting comments might not help in the future. “Let’s see, you people owned Lyndale's? Let’s Google that and see what comes up?”

Part of having a web presence is keeping it up to date and cleaning up old business. These pages float in cyberspace forever and can come back to haunt a thoughtless business person in the future.