The strips are ugly and souless but so are the malls, where the stores rarely differ from one to the next or those on the other side of the nation. The newest way to package this homogenity is a combination of the two that tries to emulate quaint city streets, complete with faux coach lights. Such transparent glitzy facades are disgusting to me. Give me the run-down funky one-of-a-kind shop any day.
> On the other
> hand, B&N is a much better bookstore than the indie it put out
> of business - Shakespeare & Co, where the staff was unhelpful
> and often rude and the stock was a fraction of B&N's.
I've heard this said before, but it has so rarely been my experience. Generally at the small mom & pop stores, I found the employees (often the owners themselves) to be experts with a genuine love of their trade, especially at the small downtown hardware stores where I'd walk in with some vaguely stated problem and walk out with solutions in parts and the knowledge to fix it. The knowledge of most employees at Home Depot and Lowe's is pathetic by comparison. At big box hardware stores, if I can find someone to help (a big if), I too often get blank looks, even when asking for something specific. Blaring so often over the PA system is "Help is needed in the X aisle" clearly demonstrating just how short staffed they are. On the other hand, going into the mom&pops seemed more like visiting friends or neighbors who were happy to see me and were genuinely pleased if I'd stay and chat awhile. Often small stores became local social centers. In most of the franchise stores, I am just a faceless number to be politely hustled in and out, often feeling like I'm imposing when I need to stop someone for help.
> DR & CVS
> are annoyingly ubiquitous, but the old local drug store had
> next to no stock and prices were high; the chains are much
> better.
Again my mileage varied. I've found items in mom & pops that I'd never find in the franchise stores. The small stores are often specialists carrying much greater variety, while the big boxes try to be everything to everyone and have limited stock. The little Asian stores carry intriguing food I've never heard of before, and common stuff is often at prices better than the chains. While chains have the advantage of buying in bulk, they also must support large heirarchies of management, higher overheads, and often stockholders, so it's quite possible to find good prices and variety in the small stores who don't carry all that baggage. Compare a tiny Manhattan side street deli to what any top-end franchise supermarket anywhere might carry and there simply is no comparison.
I may be wrong, but I think that it is quite rare at least on the east coast for chains to have unionized labor nowdays. Walmart certainly doesn't. Unions are steadily losing their influence in the few chains that still have them and unions are being actively busted now with no bones made about it. Unions are corrupt donjaknow. Some chains like CVS use contract labor thru temp agencies like Adecco in certain states.
Because the big boxes are running the mom&pops out of business and mega-mergers continue to happen, we may see the time where no competition exists and these huge corporations can call all the shots on price, having the power to prevent any new competition. I greatly fear the power of big business and intentionally shop at mom&pops whenever I can as one form of activism against globalization.
I believe the decentralization of power everywhere is needed, both in business and in gov't.
--tully