One Happy Big-Box Wasteland

[mirror]

A friend e-mailed this to me today. It is from the Aug 17/05 edition of the SF Gate

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?

Quite sad is all I can say!

[Melanie_]

Yet another big box store development is going in quite close to my home; in the last 5 years, this area has gone from fields to big box stores at an amazing rate. I have to admit that I like the convienience of having everything so close by, but I always wonder who designed the layout, as the stores seem to have been dropped from the sky with no thought to how they share the space with the other stores next to them. And who really thinks its a good idea to walk outside from store to store, across vast parking lots, during a Winnipeg winter?

The stores being generic, soulless, may be true, but at the same time I'm not necessarily looking for an esoteric experience when I want to buy school supplies at Wal-Mart, or a hammer at Home Depot.

[crazymf]

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.

I found this amusing. GW was re-elected by the moral majority conservative traditionalists in the USA, but this putz tramps on him while complaining about the loss of traditionality.

[SirSpanky]

Yet another big box store development is going in quite close to my home; in the last 5 years, this area has gone from fields to big box stores at an amazing rate. I have to admit that I like the convienience of having everything so close by, but I always wonder who designed the layout, as the stores seem to have been dropped from the sky with no thought to how they share the space with the other stores next to them. And who really thinks its a good idea to walk outside from store to store, across vast parking lots, during a Winnipeg winter?

The stores being generic, soulless, may be true, but at the same time I'm not necessarily looking for an esoteric experience when I want to buy school supplies at Wal-Mart, or a hammer at Home Depot.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ah, you must be talking about route 90, by scurfield. I think 4 of the cities 10 most dangerous intersections are on that strip. (A highway, pretty much one of 2 main traffic arteries south, with speed limit 80, booming in development)

And how does it make sense at all? I would much rather get from store to store in a traditional mall, than walk far distances, across heavily traffiked streets where everyone is pissed off cause is so damned crowded.

[cybercoma]

It's called progress. Things change all the time and most people just adapt, this guy needs to switch to decaf.

[Cameron]

He probably bought the computer he wrote it on at Staples of Office Depot....

[August1991]

I found this amusing. GW was re-elected by the moral majority conservative traditionalists in the USA, but this putz tramps on him while complaining about the loss of traditionality.

I agree. This is just efete snobbishness.

These stores are opening at a rapid pace in Eastern Europe and people love them, compared to what was available before.

In the 1960s, John Kenneth Galbraith complained about the ugliness of gas stations with those silly coloured flags stretching around, and a big rotating sign in front.

These things come and go, but it is certain that some people will always want to feel morally or esthetically superior and look down on ordinary people simply trying to manage in life.

Plague? The real plague is that people in Sudan do not have access to a Wal-Mart.

[Cameron]

I'd like to add to the conversation...This is free enterprise. Mr. Walton saw an opportunity and moved on it, the "American Way" so to speak. I personally don't like walmart, mostly because it's always busy and I don't like the way they do business and treat their suppliers.

People wanted cheaper prices on products and the market responded with volume and low over-head, aka box stores. The suburbs started to grow and this is where the box stores started, feeding the demand.

[Melanie_]

Ah, you must be talking about route 90, by scurfield. I think 4 of the cities 10 most dangerous intersections are on that strip. (A highway, pretty much one of 2 main traffic arteries south, with speed limit 80, booming in development)

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Yes, that's my neighbourhood. Every time I drive down Route 90, they are building something new.

[cybercoma]

These companies will only build stores where it's profitable.

[SirSpanky]

I dunno. Wal-mart moved into a location in an aging smaller mall by my place, only to move out a few years later to a bigger, new location.

[Black Dog]

With oil prices skyrocketing, production slowing and demand reaching a fever pitch, it seems ludicrous to continue to promote such an inefficient form of development, particularily one with such detrimental effects on the community as a whole.

These things come and go, but it is certain that some people will always want to feel morally or esthetically superior and look down on ordinary people simply trying to manage in life.

Why are esthetics and practicality mutually exclusive to you? I recently took a road trip down to southern Alberta and was struck by the increasing homogeny of so many communities. It was almost impossible to distinguish Camrose, Leduc, Red Deer, Wetaskawin from the big box "commons" complex's sprouting up across Edmonton and Calgary. It's disgusting. And if that makes me a snob, so be it. I am under no obligation to accept these blights on the landscape, these destroyers of farmland and propigators of the destructive car culture, simply becaus ethey are the choice of the working man.

[mirror]

There is a New England state, Vermont I believe, that has a law banning all billboard or any other form of advertising on their highways. I always notice when I'm driving in the country, away from the neon signs or billboards, etc., how much more relaxed I am. I believe all highway advertising apart from government safety or directional notices should be removed from all our roads. Stop occasionally and learn a little bit about nature. We are there to drive, NOT read!

[Rambler Man]

A friend e-mailed this to me today. It is from the Aug 17/05 edition of the SF Gate

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?

Huh?? How are we all the same now more so then we were in the fifties and sixties? Ever see pictures or movies of that era? Everyone is dressed exactly the same as everyone else. If you walked around with safety pins in your face and green and pink hair you would have gotten your ass beat every single day.

People are always influenced by what is popular so you have an amount of sameness in every generation, but I think the diversity seen in today's culture is 10 fold that seen in days of yesteryear.

When my dad went to high-school, they had nerds and jocks. Now there are preps, skaters, hip-hoppers, emos, goths, punks, etc. etc.

I agree that many chain stores are unsightly and surely have less character then mom and pop businesses, but to say that this has caused some kind of regression in the diversity of people is most likely a fallacy.

[SirSpanky]

With oil prices skyrocketing, production slowing and demand reaching a fever pitch, it seems ludicrous to continue to promote such an inefficient form of development, particularily one with such detrimental effects on the community as a whole.

These things come and go, but it is certain that some people will always want to feel morally or esthetically superior and look down on ordinary people simply trying to manage in life.

Why are esthetics and practicality mutually exclusive to you? I recently took a road trip down to southern Alberta and was struck by the increasing homogeny of so many communities. It was almost impossible to distinguish Camrose, Leduc, Red Deer, Wetaskawin from the big box "commons" complex's sprouting up across Edmonton and Calgary. It's disgusting. And if that makes me a snob, so be it. I am under no obligation to accept these blights on the landscape, these destroyers of farmland and propigators of the destructive car culture, simply becaus ethey are the choice of the working man.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'll look for beauty and esthetics when I'm at a gallery, or at the city park when its +30 degrees outside ;

As long as I can still get toothpaste, an office chair, plastic flowers, and a pair of jeans, all at low low prices, I'll stick with the box stores.