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Mon 26 Jul, 2004 12:29 pm
My girlfriends and I were allowed to shop on our own the summer we turned 13: 1960.
We would walk to Michigan Avenue, Dearborn, MI's "main street," a distance of three miles from my house. Sharon, Linda and AnneMarie lived further south and would pick me up on the way. Generally, we would go to the center of town, near the public library, where there were many small, independent shops, run by women who did their own buying and displayed merchandise according to their own inclinations, not according to a manual produced by headquarters.
There was a shopping center called Northland, a 40 minute drive away, and a strip mall at the newer end of Michigan Avenue. While we sometimes went to the strip mall, we mostly centered downtown.
Sometime during high school, Jacobson's opened a store on Michigan Ave. It was the fourth store in a Michigan chain. Each branch was different, catering to the people in Birmingham, Ann Arbor, Jackson and Dearborn.
The merchandise offered in dept stores was not row after row of clothes racks, but a few, well placed displays. Each little shop had its own personality and none of the stores catered to teenagers although dept stores had "junior's" sections.
How bland and boring shopping is today! The same big stores offer the same merchandise, hundreds of duplicated items in all sizes in each city, as if women in New York and Atlanta and CHicago were all the same!
Maybe there wasn't as much conformity back then. So it wasn't a rave to have all the same things.
Yup. Not that I remember shopping in the 60's, but Ican imagine what it must have been like.
And why do they have to build mall after mall? It's all the same stuff everywhere. I was so glad to move to NC four yrs ago to get away from California and the endless stores and parking lots. In that short time the area I'm in seems to have transformed itself from a land of green trees to another consumer wasteland.
"Paved paradise, put up a parking lot"
stand up for pessimism wrote:"Paved paradise, put up a parking lot"
"But now John Ashcroft wants to close down the swinging hot spots"
For about ten years now, I've been convinced there is only one buyer for North America.
I needed shorts one hot summer when my kids were small and went to a mall to buy some at what should have been summer sale time. Ever store, whether it was the Gap or Filene's or the late Jordan-Marsh (now Macy's) or the other sportswear chains all featured clothes by the same designer. Could not believe it!
I have been thinking of how bad the shopping mall is for America. It is an isolated place, surrounded by acres of blacktop. It has no connection with the community in which it is situated. Most are inconvenient to get to. None offer real variety of the sort that Main Street once offered.
Some posts on another thread reminded me of the section of my hometown -- Dearborn, Michigan -- where my family did its shopping when we first moved there in 1951.
My mother didn't drive and so we would often walk to this cluster of stores, which resembled a strip mall, and where the library's Bookmobile parked one day a week.
The stores included a druggist with a soda fountain; a grocery store run by a family -- the father and his two sons were butchers while the mother and the two daughters-in-law were cashiers; a bakery run by a family of Swedish descent; a deli (the grocer sold no luncheon meat, just fresh meat); a neighborhood bar, more of a tavern, that offered fish and chips on Friday nights. All the store owners knew our parents names and ours. We watched them through their lives and they through ours.
It was something lovely that is now lost.
Where have all the flowers gone
I agree shopping today sucks. But there is nothing worse or more boring than shopping ONLINE!
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