Relative to the wistfulness of the suburban retail landscape - I grew up in NJ too so I certainly have my head filled with images of Jamesway, KMart, Sears, Caldor, Borders, Toys-R-Us - I currently live in Manhattan, and I'm familiar with a fairly broad slice of the not-Manhattan boroughs of NYC too. Wistfulness is quite nearly a DSM-level affliction in New York City, as it's simply not possible to mourn all the "charming" places (extra scare quotes there, since "charm" also applied to places like Mars Bar, CBGB and countless toilet-level public spaces) as they go, because there were too many of them around to visit in the course of a year anyway. Not really possible to feel loss for a favorite bar if it was a bar you hadn't been to in eight years, right?
That doesn't stop some people from trying to mourn every place that goes. In fact, it's a cottage content industry - mourning everything that closes. Regardless of any other factor. For every addiction, there's a pusher.
(It doesn't help that the prevailing trend is that some of the things that closed were loved, and the things that tend to replace them are the highest bidders on the lease & utterly charmless to boot. But this may just be missing bigger picture effects that it's all a little bit more random than this... somewhere, somehow, maybe a little less often than we'd like, a really GREAT bar is opening where a bank used to be. And that doesn't fit the cottage-content-industry narrative very well.)
Regardless of trends, the adaptive thing to do is to simply acknowledge wistfulness and process it swiftly and move on. You'd become dysfunctional to feel pain every time something changed. Acknowledging the nature of these places - they're ALL ephemeral! YOU are ephemeral! - enables a more peaceful existence. I may not desire a "chaos is constant" mentality. But I have zero control over all the other people who do. I must accept it the way that I accept that water is wet & the sky is blue on a clear day. Retail businesses are brittle as hell. If you love them, visit them now and take pictures. If you don't have time to visit them... just let them go.
(By the way: Are all these retail closures materially affecting our abilities to obtain goods? Yes. I am having an absurdly hard time lately getting cat litter. I'll walk into one of the last remaining neighborhood chain pharmacies and find the ENTIRE cold medicine aisle empty, with useless locked panels covering the empty shelves. There isn't a MicroCenter in Manhattan, so my experience obtaining a non-Apple computer is a gauntlet of trials. Etc. etc. Investors willing to "disrupt" are equally willing to "destroy". But this is a larger problem than just the magic of retail or the memories of the missing. It raises bigger questions about who should be allowed to participate in the economy, in ways that could nuke the ability of people to buy everyday goods, and what terms we should set on that participation. But this has nothing to do with "Beloved Bar Closes Because Owner Is Tired Of Drunk People")
Relative to the wistfulness of the suburban retail landscape - I grew up in NJ too so I certainly have my head filled with images of Jamesway, KMart, Sears, Caldor, Borders, Toys-R-Us - I currently live in Manhattan, and I'm familiar with a fairly broad slice of the not-Manhattan boroughs of NYC too. Wistfulness is quite nearly a DSM-level affliction in New York City, as it's simply not possible to mourn all the "charming" places (extra scare quotes there, since "charm" also applied to places like Mars Bar, CBGB and countless toilet-level public spaces) as they go, because there were too many of them around to visit in the course of a year anyway. Not really possible to feel loss for a favorite bar if it was a bar you hadn't been to in eight years, right?
That doesn't stop some people from trying to mourn every place that goes. In fact, it's a cottage content industry - mourning everything that closes. Regardless of any other factor. For every addiction, there's a pusher.
(It doesn't help that the prevailing trend is that some of the things that closed were loved, and the things that tend to replace them are the highest bidders on the lease & utterly charmless to boot. But this may just be missing bigger picture effects that it's all a little bit more random than this... somewhere, somehow, maybe a little less often than we'd like, a really GREAT bar is opening where a bank used to be. And that doesn't fit the cottage-content-industry narrative very well.)
Regardless of trends, the adaptive thing to do is to simply acknowledge wistfulness and process it swiftly and move on. You'd become dysfunctional to feel pain every time something changed. Acknowledging the nature of these places - they're ALL ephemeral! YOU are ephemeral! - enables a more peaceful existence. I may not desire a "chaos is constant" mentality. But I have zero control over all the other people who do. I must accept it the way that I accept that water is wet & the sky is blue on a clear day. Retail businesses are brittle as hell. If you love them, visit them now and take pictures. If you don't have time to visit them... just let them go.
(By the way: Are all these retail closures materially affecting our abilities to obtain goods? Yes. I am having an absurdly hard time lately getting cat litter. I'll walk into one of the last remaining neighborhood chain pharmacies and find the ENTIRE cold medicine aisle empty, with useless locked panels covering the empty shelves. There isn't a MicroCenter in Manhattan, so my experience obtaining a non-Apple computer is a gauntlet of trials. Etc. etc. Investors willing to "disrupt" are equally willing to "destroy". But this is a larger problem than just the magic of retail or the memories of the missing. It raises bigger questions about who should be allowed to participate in the economy, in ways that could nuke the ability of people to buy everyday goods, and what terms we should set on that participation. But this has nothing to do with "Beloved Bar Closes Because Owner Is Tired Of Drunk People")
Great post.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I miss stores that had well made items and were fun to browse in.