Every time I see a strip mall I can name you the stores that will be found there: Starbucks, Barnes and Noble, Bed Bath and Beyond, Pier 1 Imports, Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. It doesn't even matter what city it's in - Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Portland, it's all the same. A friend of mine refers to it as Generica.
It became really apparent to me while I was in Phoenix. Normally while I'm on the road, I try to eat at places with a bit of a local flavor. I can get the chains at home, I want something unique to the area. The problem was that it got hard to find enough places like that over the course of a week. I've commented on this before, but big corporations are taking over the world.
I was talking to a girl from Germany while I was in Phoenix, and she said that it's not just like that here, it's worldwide. She said that her hometown in Germany wasn't too bad, there was only one McDonald's there, but that when she went to Mexico it was as though she hadn't even left the United States. I think it's sad in a lot of ways. A lot of the local merchants have been put out of business, and the local flavor has gone away with them. I try to do my part by buying CDs from record stores instead of places like Best Buy, and shopping at different places for things, but I'm not as good about it as I should be. Sometimes it's too hard to avoid the chains. Pretty soon, there's not likely to be any other choice.
The crazy thing is the amounts of money that these corporations are taking in. My brother-in-law told me that Exxon-Mobile's profits last year were somewhere around $35 billion. "Think about it" he said, "There's something like 400 million people in the U. S., right? That means they could give everyone in the U. S. a million dollars, and still have 34 and a half billion dollars in profit."
Sounds like a good idea to me. How about it Exxon?
5 comments:
Well said. I agree. I would like to do a better job at patronizing small book/music stores, but it can be hard to drag the kids out when I want something, so I frequently just order online. Is that better or worse than buying at a chain?
Well, they could give everyone $1 and still have 34.6 billion, but if they gave everyone $1 million, that would put them a bit in the red ($399965000000000, if my math is right).
We are on a Wal-Mart boycott here. 1 month and counting. That's saying something when you live in a tiny town in NH and there aren't a lot of options.
Ok, how about they just give me like 400 million. Screw the rest of you and your fancy math.
Wine + Math = fuzzy thinking
So, with that in mind, I'm not even going to try and figure that one out at 12:05 a.m.
I'm a small home-based business owner. I see what the Wal-Marts and such can do to a small town. They're just trying to turn a buck like the rest of us, right? But damn...just, damn.....
And the sad thing is, most small towns see a new Wal-Mart as a sign that they have finally arrived.
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