The fluorescent pink, orange and green colored window signs outside a downtown Chester Avenue furniture store say a lot about the hard times facing Bakersfield’s home furnishings retailers.

After several years of booming sales fueled by a strong housing market, local furniture and home decor merchants are now dealing with a steep drop in business. Some are closing, some downsizing and others are trying to adapt as their ranks dwindle.

Coinciding as it has with an economic slowdown that’s forcing many consumers to rein in spending, the downturn has proved too much for Shirley Vance, owner of Classic Interiors, the first-floor furniture store at 1918 Chester Ave. She hopes to clear out her entire 21,000-square-foot sales floor within a month or two with discounts as high as 70 percent.

Vance’s decision to shut down the 5-year-old business, though partly related to her recently poor health, results mainly from a slowdown that has forced her to trim her staff from nearly 30 employees in 2006 to three.

Her daughter, manager Shelli Shealey, said last Christmas was surprisingly slow. Since then, things have slowed to as few as two sales a week. Before the sale, there were days no one walked into the store at all.

“In the last six months it was like a steep decline,” Shealey said.

Their experience mirrors that of furniture and home decor retailers nationwide. Big chains such as Levitz and The Bombay Co. have filed bankruptcy and closed stores across the country.

” do without a large inventory, and instead promotes up-to-date selections.

And while she said it has been hard to see other stores closing around town, “the industry as a whole” will persevere.

“You can’t bank on the great years,” she said, “and you can’t think that when there’s a downturn it’ll last forever.”

Indeed, Corrie Jeffries, owner of Domestique on Calloway just off Rosedale, said she’s doing fine — largely because she offers teak pieces and other one-of-a-kind furniture and accessories no other stores in town carry.

“It’s all in what you’re carrying and how you carry it,” she said.

To Myrick, the president and general manager at Surroundings, what’s going on is similar to natural selection: The weak are being thinned out and the strong are getting stronger.

It won’t be long, she said, before customers are back in numbers.

“The average woman is only going to wear the same pair of shoes or have the same lamp for so long, and then she’s going to say, ‘I’m tired of that lamp, it’s time for a new lamp.’”