Is your town starting to look like every other town?

I think it's comfort food writ large.

McDonald's figured out that people loved it that whether they were in Los Angeles or Anchorage they'd be able to go to a McDonald's and know just what to expect. What it would taste like, how to order, what sides to get, everything.

That was a powerful business model that has been adapted a lot of places.

The typical tourist has limited time and, especially in New York City, a fear of appearing too podunk. How do they locate the interesting little cheap upcoming designer? How do they know whether it will be worth their time? Especially, how do they know they won't be laughed at for their unfashionable wardrobe (fine in Peoria, but NYC?), or their cluelessness about local customs? What if there are no prices and if you have to ask... What if the marked prices are just a starting point and you're expected to haggle?

The Gap is a known quantity, people know approximately what they will find, approximately what it will cost, and definitely what the procedures are. It's a bastion of familiarity.

(So, writing the above SO makes me want to go to NYC alone and wander for a week or so...)

Precisely. And that's why I live near the city center instead of the suburbs. And that's why very few tourists visit suburban areas. And that's why there are so many urban pioneers. People are longing for a sense of place. Not everyone, mind you, but there are plenty of us out there. There is hope.

My city looks like a bombed out crack house. We don't have a Starbucks, but we also don't have any good coffee. We have a lot of small, struggling, independently owned businesses for everything from retail clothing to pizza.

Seattle is a mixed bag. Of course, Starbucks started here, and there have to be more of 'em here per capita than anywhere in the world. But there are also some great independent coffee houses that seem to be thriving.

And that pretty much sums it up. Sure, you can find the chain BS, but you don't have to patronize them. Then again, our local department store, the Bon Marche, is now a Macy's.

I think the trend is beyond sad, but I'm glad this thread is here....

I live now in a victorian seaport, a town with under 30,000 population. We actually did win a vote to not allow Wal-Mart on a certain piece of land, and they haven't tried again, yet.
The next town up is a charmer, and has less of the chain stores than we do.

When I moved here five years ago, I wanted to find a lampshade, as one had been crushed in the transport. It took me weeks to find where I could buy a lampshade without a lamp holding it up.

We just got a Borders here about a year ago, our first all-new bookstore, except for a truly miserable tiny Waldenbook's in a mall. Our area has a number of interesting used bookstores though.

What I am getting at, is that this far from San Francisco, and with such a small population base, we have been slow to engage the corporations' interests, so slow that some people yearn for the access to all these wonders, even me, that once with the lampshade. Of course, I'd prefer a store like they used to have on Westwood Blvd. in Los Angeles, one that only sold old lamp parts and old and new lampshades; what a treasure trove that was.

I rue the homogenization that occurs when the chain stores outcompete the individual/unique shops. There is the matter of their selling 'knowns', the knowns being cheaper because of quantity buying by the chains, and to some extent, the all-in-one-stop shopping convenience. Price and convenience win out. Curiosity for more than that seems to just die away.

Do you live in Detroit?


Just kidding.....or am I? I live about 5 miles outside Detroit city limits.

I'd bet that my town looks a lot like your town :wink: . But no, it is in PA.

We have all those places here in the St. Petersburg, FL, USA. There are very few 2 story houses here. Most houses here are one story, and have a porch. We have lot's of short trees, except Palm's and Banyan's, they can be really tall.

I live in the Pocono Mountains where we're making the transition from "resort" to "residential". Independent pizza parlors surface, struggle and fold. Pizza Hut and Domino's survive.

I grew up in the '40's and '50's in a family that travelled for vacations. I remember my parents' positive joy on seeing a Howard Johnson's. I also remember staying in several very seedy "tourist cabins" between Howard Johnson's.

Skipping all the complicated contemplation--and jumping back to 2005--I'll suggest that standardization is one way that the general public copes with an increasingly complicated world.

Just one example:

People move across the country--and chains and franchises are familiar. When you're juggling transplanted kids and a new job and a different climate (and for the newcomers to the Poconos, unfamiliar night noises) Pizza Hut is security. So are Home Depot and MacDonalds and Ace's and Burger Kings and Dunkin Donuts.

Speculation is avid about a Krispy Kream outlet opening. Starbuck is way, way down the road. I live in a zip code characterized (or it was ten years ago) as pick-up-truck-with-gun-rack turf. Starbucks looks for sophisticated markets.

You can mourn the passing of individualism or you can pay a bit more to support the independent store.

I went with my parents to those tourist cabins too, Noddy, maybe even the same ones, as we used to drive back and forth from NY to Chicago. Howard Johnson's was a wonder to me. Perhaps we are the same age. I loved it, really.

The trick is to foster the individual store.

Me, I'd also foster a mix of new and older. The whole thing about having new everything on a seasonal basis is, frankly, too wasteful, too stupid, and not just because of waste but because of lack of sense. I didn't get this myself until about 1990, somewhere around then I got fed up with needing my wallet to be new, etc. Probably right around the time patina came to be an in word among the cogniscenti. Never mind the cogniscenti, how about appreciating existing well wrought goods and fostering their longer life?

Thus I am always an embodied mix of new shoes and thrift shop clothes, and so on.

There are not that many stores in the entire country that sell both old and new. Gee, should I patent the idea?

Or is a store with both old and new somehow repellant? Not to me, but everybody else?

That's why designers incorporate old (vintage) lines and shapes into their new products. Clothing designers especially, they pay people to bring them pieces of the classics so that everything old is new again, but when it comes to a store... . I don't know, it might work, but your buyers would have to be top notch, watching for the trends from the present designers and then searching out the vintage sellers for products that reflect and parallel them.

==
I love all the points people are making here: Osso's comfort food writ large, and Noddy's standardization = easier coping for the folks. And I'm sure there are many neighborhoods like Eva's left in Generica near city centers.
Full disclosure: Mrs. Nation and I used to live in the Cherry Street neighborhood she refers to, it was where we started practicing for the move to New York City. We walked to do all our shopping or whenever we when out to dinner, we looked in the windows of the stores, we met people we knew on the street.
When we moved across town, closer to the river, we still walked over to Peoria Avenue which despite the Blockbuster and the Wendy's, still has Hank's Burgers and a doughnut shop where you can pour your own coffee and .... okay, okay, okay... I'm getting nostalgic and that's not the point of this.

Eva has it right when she talks about urban pioneers and longing for a sense of place. I think I am troubled by the standardization homogenization because of what I think it does to the imagination.


Joe(But now I'm late, I gotta go.)Nation

Remember when the video stores first came out? There were hundreds of different ma and pa video stores. The the corporate wheel rolled into town and pulverized them. Where once was Bob's Videos now stands a Hollywood or a Blockbuster. Then, one of them will eat the other and there will be one.

It's a sad friggin' deal. Same thing with restaurants. Why do so many people want to eat that vile crap that McDonalds peddles anyway? Or Burger King?

I am on my own personal crusade regarding this issue, Joe, and that is outright refusal to patronize any of the corporate giants. You will never see me set foot in a Home Depot. I'll spend the extra money down at the hardware store that Bob owns.

And if I ever cross the threshold of a McDonalds, Burger King, or Kentucky Fried Chicken, I give God (if there is one, maybe now it's McGod) permission to strike me dead on the spot.

Fock the corporations I say. They may get rich off the multitude of glazed-eyed sheep that stagger through there doors on a relentless basis, but they will not get one friggin' penny from Ratzenhofer.

Not one god damn cent.

here in the Albaturkey on the other side of the river (where we live) is the land of strip malls but odd ones at that. Not far from our abode in a strip mall is donut shop that sells donuts/bagels/hot chicken wings and breakfast burritos with about 7 small tables and a couple of sofas where you will see old geezers (meself) young geezers on their way to work, ordinary coffee (not even decaf) seems that Crispy Creame was going to buy them out but after spending a few days talking with the reg customers they opted out. we ain't got no kulture they said.

I got chased out of Albaturkey one time for rummaging through some petrified wood.

How was I to know it was private property?

But that's another story.

It has nothing to do with the corporations raping the planet.

Do they have McPetrified Wood in Albaturkey nowadays?

dear dear Gus, a few blocks from our house is the Petroglyph National Monument, when we walk there I am required to wear a sign that says "Illegal to touch the artifacts." Diane walks behind me a comfortable distance for she fears the long arm of the law.(she also carries a 357 mag to discourge other would be law breakers)

BBB
The home I bought in Albuquerque is part of a developer's small neighborhood. The houses are all alike. I've done my best to change the front and rear yards to be different as well as the inside.

The following site will show pictures of the land and housing that I helped to develop and maintain on an island in San Francisco Bay when I lived and worked there. You will enjoy the lagoon system that meanders around the site and the many parks in the open space.

http://www.harborbay.org/homepage/index3.html

BBB

I can't believe Calamity is cheering the local Ikea. Now there's a store that literally makes me want to run away screaming back to the chair with leather straps.

Oh, I can't disagree with you more on Ikea. We Americans need cheap, recyclable, well-designed furniture to store all of our crap!

cj, I'm European, I grew up with IKEA, so naturally I like to
shop there for european beds and bed linens and dishes,
and Lingoberries, and...........

Actually, I think there is nothing wrong to have certain stores
spread across the entire country. When I visit the east coast,
at least I know that at Starbucks I'll get a good cup of coffee.

What I would like to see is that these corporate identities
blend more into the neighborhoods they build in instead of
sticking out like an eye sore.

We have - like everywhere else - a Victoria's Secret store
in town that blends in perfectly with the rest of the architecture, as you can see here: