Cold City
I often mourn for yesterday. Though I might be
looking back through an idealized lens of
nostalgia, in so many ways it seems like the world
of yesterday was slower, simpler, more serene. The
modern world has brought us many conveniences:
supermarkets, superstores, super-sized fast food
meals. In virtually any city in America, you can
drive to a shopping center ringed with gigantic
warehouse-sized stores and find everything you
need. The time saved allows you to maintain the
already frenetic pace of your busy life, and the
money saved lets you afford a pound of Starbucks
Caffe Verona instead of Folgers. Is it worth
it?
There's no need to discuss the homogenization of
such chain superstores. I think it's clear to
everyone how devoid of personality such stores like
Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Staples are. We know what
we lost when we allowed such chains to suffocate
the "mom-n-pop" shops, but we caved in to the
Faustian tradeoff of convenience and cheapness for
personality and integrity. Now we reap the
consequences every time we fight for a parking
space in a super-sized parking lot; argue with a
sales clerk who couldn't care less; or wait for 20
minutes in one cashier's line while 29 other cash
registers sit idle.
We really don't save much time or money, at
least not enough to make it worth what it has done
to our society. Chain stores do offer other
intangibles not often found at small independents,
such as no-questions-asked return/refund policies.
But so often such policies are abused by people
purchasing an item, using it for a few days and
returning it. Chain stores also offer consistency;
if you know what one offers, you know what they all
offer. But the other side of that coin means that
what one doesn't carry, neither do any of the
others.
When one considers such retail clones in the
context of the hectic pace of modern life, it
becomes a chicken-or-the-egg question which was the
result of the other. More likely, both phenomena
fed on each other in a downwardly spiraling
negative feedback loop. As life became more busy,
chain superstores became more attractive. As such
stores became more common, we filled what little
time we saved with even more activity. Now, the two
forces together have become a whirlwind.
As I have observed (and experienced) the
increasingly busy pace of life in modern America,
one thought has remained a comfort: that at least
the aptly-named Old World has maintained its quaint
traditions and ways of life. When I visited Italy
two years ago, the narrow streets were still filled
with "mom-n-pop" stores and restaurants. America
may be doomed, but the world still has hope.
But alas, as we've done with our pop culture,
we've now exported our retail lifestyle. The chain
store phenomenon is sweeping across Europe, and
Italy is only its latest victim. That
quintessential Italian icon, the mom-n-pop food
shop where you can buy a baguette or a panino, is
falling before the onslaught of the supermarket,
just as the American icon—the "general
store"—did long ago.
Rome is becoming "a cold city," said grocer
Antonio Tiberi in the
article which prompted me to write this column.
I know all too well what he means. Temperatures
have plummeted here in America over the last 20
years, and I fear they'll never rise again.
Development note: I've
noticed that this site doesn't look like it should
in Netscape Navigator. Rather than waste time
jury-rigging it to look right in a
soon-to-be-obsolete browser, I'll just add the
cliché "This site best viewed with Internet
Explorer."
©2003 Michael
Strickland ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED
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