Life Isn’t Good

In what can be called one of the most blatantly ironic financial events in recent memory, the Everything’s Jake store at 36 JFK Street in the Garage—purveyors of the plucky t-shirt brand famous for the “Life is good” slogan—closed its doors last Sunday. According to store owner Glen Tompkins, the economy simply “knocked us out.”

But silver lining isn’t hard to find for Tompkins, who has been surrounded by the brand’s optimistic stick figures since the store opened in August of 2006, “It’s not all doom and gloom,” he said.

While Tompkins noted a contingent of “die-harders” in Cambridge, a lack of sales and high rent overcame what he described as a “little piece of optimism” from economic reality.

“I actually found the other employees to be really negative, and it seemed to me like the management was in a bit of turmoil,” said M. Amelia Muller ’11, who worked at Everything’s Jake for a brief period last year. Muller added that she also worked at a Life is good store in her hometown of Greenville, S.C. which, though still open, is also struggling.

Some shoppers at the closeout sale were wary of purchasing the products, despite slashed prices. Mariana Toledo, a Cambridge resident who had heard of the sale, came and left empty-handed. When asked if she would have felt more inclined to express herself through her t-shirt if the slogans had greater variety, like “Life is Average” or “Life is Not So Good Today,” she replied, “Yeah, I probably would.”

Although the failure of the Everything’s Jake store may indicate that fewer people are now buying into what the famous stick figures have to say, some customers take comfort in Jake’s encouraging words.

“I like what it says,” declared Toledo’s mother, Maria. “I like what that means.”