Wednesday, August 17, 2005

One Happy Big-Box Wasteland

Note from Steve: I don't agree with the author's assertion that all the growth of retail chains is bad. He does have a couple of good points, though. But only a couple :-)

Oh my yes, there is indeed one force that is eating away the American soul like a cancer

Mark Morford
SF Gate Columnist

Do you want to feel like you might as well be in Tucson or Boise or Modesto or Wichita or Muncie and it no longer freakin' matters, because we as a nation have lost all sense of community and place? Why, just pull over, baby. Take the next exit. Right here, this very one.

Ah, there it is, yet another massive big-box mega-strip mall, a giant beacon of glorious community decay, a wilted exclamation point of consumerism gone wild. This is America. You have arrived. You are home. Eat it and smile.

There is the Target. There is the Wal-Mart and there is the Home Depot and the Kmart, the Borders and the Staples and the Sam's Club and the Office Depot and the Costco and the Toys "R" Us and of course the mandatory Container Store so you may buy more enormous plastic tubs in which to dump all your new sweatshop-made crap.

What else do you need? Ah yes, food. Or something vaguely approximating it. There is the Wendy's and the Burger King and the Taco Bell/KFC hybrid (ewww) and there is the Mickey D's and the Subway and the Starbucks and the dozen other garbage-food fiends lined up down the road like toxic dominoes, all lying in wait to maul your arteries and poison your heart and make you think about hospitals.

And here's the beautiful part: This snapshot, it's the same as it was 10 miles back, same as it will be 10 miles ahead, the exact same massive cluster of insidious development as you will find in roughly 10,000 noncommunities around the nation and each and every one making you feel about as connected to the town you're in and the body you inhabit as a fish feels on Saturn. In the dark. In a hole. Dead.

You have seen the plague. I have seen the plague. Anyone over 30 has seen the plague evolve from a mere germ of disease in the late '80s to a full-blown pestilence of big-box shopping hell. I was recently up in northern Idaho, where my family has owned a beautiful house on a lake in a tiny burg near the Canadian border for 40 years, and to get to this region you must pass through the explosively grown resort town of Coeur d'Alene, and the plague is there perhaps worse than anywhere within a 75-mile radius.

I am officially old enough to remember when passing through Coeur d'Alene meant stopping at exactly one -- one -- traffic light on Highway 95 on the way north, surrounded by roughly one million pine trees and breathtaking mountain vistas and vast, calming open spaces, farms and fields and sawmills and funky roadside shops and gorgeous lakes for miles.

There are now about 20 traffic lights added in as many years, scattered down a 10-mile stretch of highway and each and every one demarcates a turnoff into a massive low-lying horribly designed strip mall, tacky and cheaply built and utterly heartless, and clearly zero planning went into any of these megashops, except to space them so obnoxiously that you have to get back in your goddamn car to drive the eighth of a mile to get to the Target to the Best Buy to the Wal-Mart to the Super Foods and back to your freakin' sanity.

Do you want to know what depresses the American spirit? Do you want to know why it feels like the center cannot hold and the tyranny of mediocrity has been loosed upon our world? Do you want to know what instills more thoughts of suicide and creates a desperate, low-level rage the source of which we cannot quite identify but which we know is right under our noses and which we now inhale Prozac and Xanax and Paxil by the truckload to attempt to mollify?

I have your answer. Here it is. Look. It is the appalling spread of big-box strip malls, tract homes like a cancer, metadevelopments paving over the American landscape, all creating a bizarre sense of copious loss, empty excess, heartless glut, forcing us to ask, once again, the Great All-American Question: How can we have so damned much but still feel like we have almost nothing at all?

Oh and by the way, Coeur d'Alene has a distinct central portion of town, well off the toxic highway. It is calm and tree lined and emptily pretty and it is packed with, well, restaurants and art galleries. And real estate offices. For yuppies. Because, of course, there are no local shops left. No mom-and-pops, few unique small businesses of any kind. No charm. No real community per se. Just well-manicured food and mediocre art no true local can actually afford and business parks where the heart used to be.

I have little real clue as to what children growing up in this sort of bizarre megaconsumerist dystopia will face as they age, what sort of warped perspective and decimated sense of place and community and home. But if you think meth addiction and teen pregnancy and wicked religious homogeny and a frightening addiction to blowing s-- up in violent video games isn't a direct reaction to it, you're not paying close enough attention.

This is the new America. Our crazed sense of entitlement, our nearly rabid desire for easy access to mountains of bargain-basement junk has led to the upsurge of soulless big-box shops which has, in turn, led to a deadly sense of prefabricated, vacuous sameness wherever we go. And here's the kicker: We think it's good. We think it helps, brings jobs, tax money, affordable goods. We call it progress. We call it choice. It is the exact opposite.

Result No. 1: Towns no longer have personality, individuality, heart. Community drags. Environment suffers. Our once diverse and quirky and idiosyncratic landscape becomes ugly and bland and vacuous and cheap.

Result No. 2: a false sense of safety, of comfort, wrought of empty sameness. We want all our goods to be antiseptic and sanitized and brightly lit and clean. In a nation that has lost all sense of direction and all sense of pride and whose dollar is a global joke and whose economy is running on fumes and whose goods are all made overseas and whose incompetent warmongering leader makes the world gag, that toxic sameness is, paradoxically, reassuring.

Result No. 3: We are trained, once again, to fear the different, the Other, That Which Does Not Conform. We learn to dislike the unique, the foreign, foreigners. We lose any sense of personal connection to what we create and what we buy and I do not care how cheap that jute rug from Ikea was: When they are mass-produced in 100,000 chunks in a factory in Malaysia, it ain't quirky.

Sameness is in. Sameness is the new black. It is no different than preplanned Disney World vacations or organized religion or preplanned cruises or themed restaurants where all edges have been filed off and every experience has been predigested and sanitized for your protection because God forbid you have an authentic experience or nurture genuine individual perspective or dare to question the bland norm lest your poor addled soul shudder and recoil and the Powers That Be look at you as a serious threat.

I have seen the plague and so have you. Hell, you're probably shopping in it. After all, what choice do you have?

7 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  2. This guy sounds like James Howard Kuntsler.

    I too decry the blandness and homogeneity of modern America, manifest in the built environment as well as the psyche of its citizenry. But this article reads like a "bitch session" that improperly identifies retail, and big box retail specifically, as a major cause of our current reality. Nothing could be further from the truth.

    In the late 1800's, the development of transcontinental railroads, the telegraph, and the telephone began to break down regional barriers and create a national identity. Automobiles soon followed, along with highways, and later, Interstates. The jet age ushered in an unprecedented era of mobility, making it possible to go from one coast to the other in a matter of hours. Through movies, radio and television, a "popular culture" developed that superseded local tastes and traditions. A "national market" was created for products and services. All of these factors led to today's United States, where we all watch the same TV shows and movies, listen to the same music, see the same commercials, and buy the same things. We would not have national chains of fast food joints and big box stores without automobiles and television.

    With regard to cities, the move towards suburbia began in earnest before World War II (L.A. in particular provided a "sneak preview") and became most pronounced in the Postwar era. Unique city centers declined while homogeneous (nearly identitical) suburbs prospered in cities coast to coast. Suburbs were encouraged by government subsidies ranging from the Interstates to the mortgage interest income tax deduction. Big box stores are merely the newest addition to the dominant suburban environment that has been developing in this country for decades.

    After World War II we became a "superpower" and entered an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity (effecting what Kunstler calls "The Victory Disease") and a new type of society developed, sadly it was one based on a sense of entitlement.

    Sameness and conformity have been "in" for a long time. People want to "belong" to something, that's why there's organized religion, political parties, and PTAs -- this is true in other nations too! People "outside the norm" have always been ostracized, and if I remember correctly, it was legal in this country to enslave a certain group of people based on their skin color for about 80 years. People have been forced to keep fighting for their rights - women (didn't they get the vote less than 100 years ago?), minorities (remember the civil rights movement?), homosexuals and lesbians. And we've always demonized foreigners, especially in times of war. There's nothing new under the sun.

    Looking closer at retail, the move from local stores to national chains began with A&P in the late 1800's. In the 1920's, Sears (formerly only a mail-order house) began building a nationwide chain of department stores. Neither Wal-Mart, Home Depot, nor Toys R Us or any other big box chain started this trend, in fact they've come in on the tail end of it, though they may have perfected it. The combination of widespread automobile use, growing suburbs, and national media allowed for the rise of McDonald's, Taco Bell, KFC, and the rest. Chains may only now seem dominant, but they didn't get that way overnight. They offered a superior model to "mom and pop" stores and restaurants, at least in an economic sense -- yes, Americans ultimately chose low prices and convenience over quality, taste, health, and local identity, but this was in no way preordained or "forced" by the chains.

    I hate it when people idealize the past as some perfect era, especially this author, who looks back fondly on the late 1980's! If he really wanted to go back in time and try to reverse the trends that created the America he seems to despise, he would have to go back to the late 1880's, but by then it may have been too late.

    This column is extremely negative and makes life in this country seem far worse, and far more hopeless, than it really is. What really annoys me is that the author points out so many problems and offers no solutions. He seems resigned to the fact that everything's ruined, that it's too late to do anything, as if we don't have thousands of years of history behind us to show that every society evolves. Kunstler is equally pessimistic about our present and our future, but at least he has some ideas on what we can do about it!

    The author hints that a lot of his displeasure is rooted in the fact that we live in the era of George W. Bush, which doesn't surprise me as he is obviously a Left Coast Liberal. Well, I'm a Left Coast Liberal too, but I recognize that Bush is "a man of his times," and while this implies these are desperate times indeed, times will change. Fast food, big boxes, reactionary politics, and lackluster political leaders won't be around forever, but they're here now and we have the responsibility to work to make this the kind of nation we deserve to live in, not sit back and whine and wish for the "good old days," which a lot of people probably didn't think were all that good when they were living through them.

    I have to say, "give me a break!" Big box stores are not the root of all that currently ails our nation, nor is our homogenized culture, nor is suburban sprawl, nor is consumerism itself. We are a nation of people, and I am still young and idealistic enough to believe people have the power - our cities and retailers don't hold ultimate power over us and how we act and feel.

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  3. I couldn't have said it better myself, Mitch.

    The author suffers from a bad case of nostalgia. Everyone does from time to time, but in some, it is so strong that it clouds one's memory.

    With nostalgia, no matter how bad the "good old days" were, they are, in the person's mind, better than now. Why? Because we were younger and we didn't give a damn about what we were doing, becaue what we were doing seemed new and fresh, no matter how stupid it was.

    We get older, our libido dies down, we get wrinkled and start aching, then everything we seee starts sucking. Without even physiaclly seeing this dude, I can tell that is the case in that author's assesment of modern times. He's old. And bitter.

    I lived through the late '80s and remember it quite well. I can tell you that things weren't any better for the uniqueness of cities back then that it is now.

    In fact, it may have been worse then, because nobody was making much effort to create real cities. It was all about suburbanizing downtown with vertical malls and festival marketplaces filled with chain stores. None of that stuff stuck, and the carcasses of our planning failures are still there, mocking us, as we recreate real streets and environments in cities...finally.

    I respect his perspective, because he's not completely wrong, but geez, Mark, lighten up and take some vitamins and get laid. It'll be okay. :-)

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  4. I like this guy's sarcasm, but he certainly is bitter. I'd divulge my own commentary, but I am at work and that would make me unproductive. However, I felt I must share this link:

    http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05229/555322.stm

    Wal*Mart is attempting to quintuple their liquor sales. Previously, you could buy anything BUT liquor at Wal*Mart, but now you don't need to shop anywhere else because they have booze, too. How's that for lack of variety in life?

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  5. Sam's Choice bourbon and Great Value wine-in-a box? ACK!

    That's gonna take some patient winos to wait in those checkout lines :-)

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  6. How ever on earth are they going to patrol the self-checkout area?? I can see the underage hillbillies lining up with JD now...

    The question is, by what percentage will the teenage pregnancy rate rise as a result of minors purchasing hard liquor at the Wal*Mart self-check-out lane?

    By the way...have you heard the story about the loss prevention employees at a Wal*Mart who tackled and somehow managed to kill a shoplifter? I'll have to locate the written word on that one....

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  7. Had not heard about the trampled dead shoplifter. That's f*cked up!

    I can totally see those checkout lines: "Cletus Jr! Go get Mama some Wild Turkey 'fore they get through with them folks in front of us!"

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