When this hick from the sticks arrived in Lawrence in 1992, I became excited when I saw the sign for the downtown store The Buckle. I went in to buy a dinner-size plate one, with big steer horns, but quickly learned the place really wasn’t selling belt buckles. Soon, it won’t be selling anything in Lawrence. The longtime retailer is leaving town.

Claire Little, manager of The Buckle at 805 Massachusetts St., confirmed that the chain has decided to close its downtown store and won’t seek another spot in Lawrence to replace it. An exact closing date hasn’t been set, but Little said it likely would be in April or a bit before.

Little said she wasn’t privy to all the details behind the decision by the Nebraska-based chain to close the Lawrence store. But she indicated the company had decided it could serve the Lawrence market with its Kansas City and Topeka stores. None of those stores are closing, and the approximately 10 to 15 employees of the Lawrence store will be offered a chance to transfer to those locations, if they so choose, Little said.

Little wasn’t quite sure how long The Buckle had been in downtown Lawrence, but it is a 25-year plus member of Lawrence’s retail scene. It also occupies a larger than average space in downtown. At the moment, I don’t believe there is anything lined up to take the place of The Buckle. The Buckle becomes at least the third fairly large space seeking a tenant: the former Buffalo Wild Wings spot is vacant, and the former M&M Office Supply building also is vacant, although construction work has started there. (You may remember in April we reported on a plan to put a new facade on the building, with the apparent goal of making a multi-tenant office or retail building. I have heard some rumors about office users. I’ll report back when I hear more.)

The Buckle’s pending closure comes on the heels of at least two other announcements: The closing of the TCBY store and the pending closure of the Ten Thousand Villages retail store in downtown. The closing also comes just after I reported that Lawrence had the best sales tax growth of any major retail market in the state in 2016. The two are not contradictory, but rather just a reminder that success is rarely distributed equally.

It will be interesting to watch for other closing signs. We are in that time period where many downtown leases are set to expire. That’s often when a business decides to close shop.

In other news and notes from around town:

• I’m not sure anyone is really going to toast Gov. Sam Brownback’s proposal to close the state’s budget gap. I’m quite sure one group that won’t is the liquor store industry.

As J-W statehouse reporter Peter Hancock reported yesterday, the governor’s plan calls for the state to raise its “liquor enforcement tax” to 16 percent. In case you are unfamiliar, the liquor enforcement tax is the special type of sales tax that you pay on purchases made at a liquor store. I have written about this topic several times before, most recently in March.

The current liquor enforcement tax is 8 percent. That’s the only tax you pay when you buy a product at a liquor store. The city’s standard 9.05 percent sales tax is not charged at a liquor store. That has created the odd situation where Lawrence residents pay more in taxes for groceries than they do for liquor.

photo by: Nick Krug

In this file photo from June 9, 2010, Lawrence resident Diane McFarland browses the wine selection at Myers Retail Liquor, 902 W. 23rd Street.

Back in March, I sought to highlight how common that situation was across the state. Back in March — and I don’t suspect the numbers have changed much since then — I found that more than 300 jurisdictions in Kansas had sales tax rates greater than 8 percent. In more densely populated areas, it was the norm.

Kansas had 23 cities with a population of 20,000 or more. Of those, 21 cities have sales tax rates greater than 8 percent. The majority of Kansas’ population pays more in taxes for bananas than bourbon.

If Brownback’s plan is approved, that will no longer be the case. The price of drinking in Kansas will go up. A $25 bottle of liquor would have an extra $2 in tax attached to it. Bars and restaurants also pay the liquor enforcement tax on the bottles of booze they buy, so expect them to try to pass along the extra cost in the form of higher cocktail prices.

The liquor enforcement tax would rise from 8 percent to 16 percent under the plan. That’s a big increase, but in some ways it brings the liquor enforcement tax back in line with its original standing. For whatever reason, the liquor enforcement tax hasn’t been increased since 1983. Back in 1983, the 8 percent liquor tax was nearly double the normal sales tax that consumers were paying for groceries and other items. Brownback’s proposal will roughly restore that type of ratio.

It won’t be popular in all circles. The liquor industry — which in many ways is headquartered in Lawrence with two major distributors, one of the top lobbyists for the industry, and a very large bar community based here — will note liquor already is taxed a lot. The state charges a gallonage tax at the wholesale level. Plus, there is an entirely separate 10 percent tax called a liquor drink tax that consumers pay when they buy a cocktail at a bar or restaurant. No doubt, the state does a fair amount of milking of the liquor industry.

But still, the optics aren’t good on this. When I go to the counter with a bottle of bourbon and a batch of bananas, the clerk is going to add more tax onto the bananas than the bourbon. It is not for me to say whether that is the right message to send, but it should be interesting to watch how politicians navigate it all.

Or maybe we should watch for this: bourbon-infused bananas. It might be the answer to the state’s budget problems. We could tax that product twice.