A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Let us now praise Starbucks, Borders, Target…

Speaking of the blessings of a consumer society, Virginia Postrel, who is basically the anti-Crunchy Con, has an article in defense of chain stores (link will decay).

As someone who grew up in a small town, I have come to appreciate chain stores. The much ballyhooed “mom and pop” stores in my home town were frequently understocked and overpriced. There was no decent place to buy (just to mention a few things) books, comic books, music, and other staples of adolescent life. The closest “good” bookstore was a Waldenbooks twenty miles away. It’s easy for people who have lived their whole lives in a city dense with hip independent bookstores to sneer at Borders or Barnes & Nobel, but the first time I walked into one I thought I was in heaven.

The access that suburban and small-town Americans now have to a good selection of books, decent coffee, music of every conceivable genre, and so on thanks to chain stores (not to mention online retailing) has to be unprecedented. Not that there aren’t costs too, but let’s not pretend there aren’t perks.

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5 responses to “Let us now praise Starbucks, Borders, Target…”

  1. Camassia

    You make a good point, but I do wonder how you would feel if you continued to live in a small town as an adult. Children are concerned mostly about the amount and quality of stuff they can get, but adults worry about things like autonomy, communal cohesion, employer relations, etc. I get the feeling those are more important concerns with chain stores than the aesthetic considerations Postrel describes.

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  2. Lee

    It’s a good question. Though having just been back to my hometown over Thanksgiving, my initial response is “I would’ve gone crazy!” 😉

    I think you’re right that different values drive the resistance to chain store encroachment than those Postrel is talking about. On the other hand, I’m wary of saying to people in places like the town where I grew up that they should be virtuous and eschew the Wal-Mart that opened several years back while I, living in a major metropolitan area, have easy access to all life’s amenities and never have to soil my conscience by stepping across Wal-Mart’s threshold (of course, I freqeuntly step across the threshold of Target and Borders, which are more “upscale” and thus not so bad(?). There’s an inescapable class element that comes in here).

    Another interesting thing is that, as far as the place I grew up is concerned, it’s not Wal-Mart and its ilk that caused all the “good” jobs to go away. That long preceded Wal-Mart and has more to do with NAFTA and globalization. The jobs that would have enabled a young guy with a high school diploma in, say, my dad’s generation to support his family in my hometown were in manufacturing. But those jobs are for the most part long gone. It’s not as though mom and pop grocery stores were ever employing large numbers of people at high wages. So, it seems to me that chain stores become a kind of scapegoat (again the class angle – the kind of people who write screeds against Wal-Mart probably never shop there) for what is in fact a much broader phenomenon. And maybe some of the opposition that chain stores generate is really a kind of rear-guard action against globalization.

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  3. Camassia

    Yeah, I think you’re right — chain stores are just one aspect of businesses becoming larger and more centralized, which small towns have suffered from in a variety of ways. I suspect that the same process hitting agriculture has had an impact too, as many rural stores were probably supported by the income of local small farmers.

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  4. Joshie

    I dunno, I hesitate to say this because I sound a little too free-markety when I say it, but most people I know care most about making ends meet and being able to buy food, furnature and other goods at affordable prices. I sometimes shop at places like Meijer and Wal-mart because they’re cheap, pure and simple. Most people who, unlike me, work for a living are more concerned with getting through to the next paycheck than about the larger concerns Camassia mentions.

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  5. Lee

    Joshie – I agree, but that doesn’t mean that the values that are sometimes sacrificed so people can have access to cheap goods aren’t real values. I think to be aware that there are real tradeoffs, rather than either cheerleading for cheap goods uber alles or self-righteously denouncing them in a fit of aesthetic snobbery, is the first step in thinking about how we, individually and maybe as a society, should set about balancing them. People may sometimes find that accepting the offer of cheap goods is a Faustian bargain that leads to worse stuff down the road (not always, but it’s good to be aware of the possibility).

    On the other hand, it’s always important to bear in mind who’s being asked to make the sacrifices. You rightly point out that many people don’t have the luxury of worrying about aesthetic or communal concerns when they’re trying to make ends meet.

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