I live in a small village of just 1,600 people. I hoped that by moving here, I would escape some of the bland sameness that is taking over so much of the United States. Yet, a year after we moved in, the village got two dollar stores and a video store that’s just part of a national chain that can be found in town after town after town.
We don’t have any truly local grocery stores in our village any more. We have two chain store groceries: The Shur Save and The Sav A Lot.
The misspellings in these brand names seem to reflect a coarsening that goes beyond language. What’s rich and true, and good in food matters less now than what’s cheap. With every one of these new stores that comes in, that’s how our village looks: Cheap.
I’m not one of those food nazis who lectures people when they don’t eat macro this or whole that. There’s something disconnected, though, when a village’s food comes from a truck, from a factory where ingredients are brought from the four corners of the earth, and homogenized, to be sold through a chain store that’s the same wherever we go.
The ground becomes something to hold up shiny buildings with bright lights, a thing across which to carve roads. We don’t watch our food grow, and we don’t know what we eat any more. Our landmarks aren’t hills and trees, streams and ponds. We travel according to highway numbers and watch for the stores to know where we are.
When there’s the same store in every town, how do we know which town we live in? Which Walgreens do you live next to? Which Home Depot do I turn left at to get to the school?
Local identity takes investment, and this is not a time of investing in our communities. We’d rather save what we can for ourselves, so that we can get inside with a new TV set with a screen over 100 inches wide to watch the same cable television set that they’re watching in Olympia, and Sacramento, and Conway, and Waterloo, and Rockport. It saves us the work of knowing where we are when we can all watch the same show on the same stage.
When we could be anywhere, we can’t be anywhere.
Save us from savings.
I would agree totally. There’s a little town on the way to my in-laws. Nice little town. Has your local pizza place, butcher shop, cheese store (this is wisconsin after all), etc…. But in the last year, they got a “Dollar” store. I can’t help but notice that place every time I drive through now. It’s really seems to cheapen the place.
And I too live is a small town. Our only grocery store is an Econofoods. It’s not very good. I had been driving to the next town over which had a County Market. It’s a chain store, but I’ve always been much happier with the quality of the food there. A friend commented on how good some red peppers I had were. She said they were much better than what she gets at the HUGE Cub Foods chain. But alas, a Super-Walmart opened across the street and the County Market is now closed.
well, as i have always said: no matter where you go, there you are.
also works the other way: no matter where you are, there you go.
at this point i have pretty much given up on amurka … all things being equal, even if this iraq debacle straightens out in the next five years, we have the war against china looming in the next twenty years (if you listen hard you can hear the rumblings of the buildup against china already)