New and Old #50
Friday roundup and commentary
Community Plumbing: How the hardware store orders things, neighborhoods, and material worlds, Places Journal, Shannon Mattern, July 2018
This is a vision of the hardware store as episteme. It holds (and organizes) the tools, values, and knowledges that bind a community and define a worldview. There’s a material and social sensibility embodied in the store, its stuff, and its service, and reflected in the diverse clientele. That might sound a bit lofty for a commercial establishment that sells sharp objects and toxic chemicals. But the ethos is palpable.
More:
[T]he fundamentals of the hardware store are pretty old-school: hammers and hex screws and houseplants. It is a “repository of literally centuries of knowledge and experience,” and its wares include “some of the most artfully — and practically — engineered items in existence.”
A lovely, thoughtful piece on an increasingly rare sort of local business. I’m not going to quote more, just do yourself a favor and read the whole thing.
According to this news article, K-Mart’s location number peaked as recently as the 1990s. There are now just four left in the entire country. As I noted in a recent piece on rural retail, dozens of K-Mart-style chains folded in the ’90s and 2000s as the larger and more modern Walmart and Target expanded drastically. K-Mart was the final national or large regional chain of its kind—by which I mean smaller, rarely carrying groceries, and never shedding its plain 1970s aesthetic—and it has been slowly dying for as long as I’ve been aware of it.
This also raises a more conceptual question for me. Chain businesses have their own supply chains, store brands, and other in-house infrastructure—how does a “chain” of just four remaining locations keep that going? It’s almost like how it becomes harder to restore an endangered species, the fewer of its numbers are left.
I’ll probably be writing more about this.
Nearly every day Auora Gámez, 48, walks from her home in Falls Church, Virginia, to the Culmore Shopping Center just off Leesburg Pike. She says it takes about 15 minutes on foot to get to her job at a laundromat inside the strip mall. Although the walk is relatively short, each trip Gámez worries about her safety.
More:
Leesburg Pike…is not just a busy corridor. It’s bounded by many immigrant-owned and frequented restaurants, storefronts, and neighborhoods. And according to Gámez, it’s also common to see children and teens walking through, because of the proximity to Bailey’s Elementary School, Glen Forest Elementary School, and Justice High School.
This is all a stone’s throw away from the neighborhood which inspired these two posts (here and here.) It’s also very similar to the neighborhoods in Montgomery County, Maryland I wrote about here.
These are car-oriented suburban communities built for the motoring middle class, but are now home to large working-class immigrant populations. These newer residents don’t drive as much, largely because they can’t all afford a car. And they don’t have the political clout the old guard has, some of whom don’t really even grasp the fact that these places have changed over the decades.
Ironically, the hostility of the development pattern itself can make it appear that pedestrians don’t belong here or are doing something wrong—“what were you doing walking there anyway?”—when in reality they’re doing what people can and should be able to do. When I talk about car dependence or the car as price of entry to American society, this is the kind of thing I’m talking about.
This Is Peak Subscription, The Atlantic, Amanda Mull, March 3, 2022
Well, I hope not—keep or add your subscription here, whatever else you do! However, Mull has a point. Subscription-based businesses—pay something monthly and get digital access to some kind of content, or a box in the mail—have passed the point of being new or trendy and are feeling a little old hat. There’s almost too much choice—you can get monthly boxes of everything from shaving equipment to fish or steaks to meal boxes to wine to fishing lures to virtually anything else. Not to mention they’re often difficult to cancel, or in some cases even remember.
It’s interesting to watch a business concept rise, develop, and possibly decline in real time, in what’s really quite a short period.
Related Reading:
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I worked at a Kmart in Toms River, New Jersey as an adolescent in the 1980s. I can't say I have any nostalgia for the place, having spent Thanksgiving pushing shopping carts through the snow across the parking lot and such. Not exactly the stuff of romance. But that flashing blue light ("Attention Kmart shoppers!" for those of you of a certain age who will remember) brings back peculiar memories.
The old Kmarts were squat concrete buildings with zero charm imbedded in a depressing suburban landscape along the highway. I rode my bike there in all weather as motorists attempted to drive me off the road as a kind of punishment for not being in a car. It was part of the poverty tax I just had to suck up, along with being stopped by the police frequently and being asked to explain myself for "suspicious activity." Being a pedestrian in that environment constituted "probable cause" for an impromptu inspection of the contents of my backpack. Ritual humiliation was just part of the deal.
The suburbs were intentionally built to physically exclude lower income people. Now that many of these auto-dependent places are aging, their flagship retailers like Kmart are dying off, and the demographic is shifting they will eventually be reinvented. The burden won't be on municipal officials to make them more walkable or accommodating. Instead, town leaders double down on the idea that they need to find ever more creative ways to filter out the "wrong element."
On the other hand, I suspect some of these dead Kmarts in funky downwardly mobile suburbs might be the best possible habitat for future bohemians looking for cheap flexible accommodations the way industrial lofts once attracted artists and misfits.
I used to subscribe to Bloomberg Businessweek. I didn't have time for it so I let it lapse, but the last few pages of every issue were always culture/arts/etc. It seemed like every week, there was a profile of a Harvard Business School student or recent grad starting a business that mailed people something in a box every month. I guess it's better than new financial magic tricks, but still, not super imaginative.