[Vision2020] big box stores?

[bill bonte]

Are big box stores in our future? Let's hope not! The following  
appeared in SFGate:

Do you want to feel like you might as well be in Tucson or Boise or  
Modesto or Wichita or Muncie and it no longer freakin' matters,  
because we as a nation have lost all sense of community and place?  
Why, just pull over, baby. Take the next exit. Right here, this very  
one.

Ah, there it is, yet another massive big-box mega-strip mall, a giant  
beacon of glorious community decay, a wilted exclamation point of  
consumerism gone wild. This is America. You have arrived. You are  
home. Eat it and smile.

There is the Target. There is the Wal-Mart and there is the Home  
Depot and the Kmart, the Borders and the Staples and the Sam's Club  
and the Office Depot and the Costco and the Toys "R" Us and of course  
the mandatory Container Store so you may buy more enormous plastic  
tubs in which to dump all your new sweatshop-made crap.

What else do you need? Ah yes, food. Or something vaguely  
approximating it. There is the Wendy's and the Burger King and the  
Taco Bell/KFC hybrid (ewww) and there is the Mickey D's and the  
Subway and the Starbucks and the dozen other garbage-food fiends  
lined up down the road like toxic dominoes, all lying in wait to maul  
your arteries and poison your heart and make you think about hospitals.

You have seen the plague. I have seen the plague. Anyone over 30 has  
seen the plague evolve from a mere germ of disease in the late '80s  
to a full-blown pestilence of big-box shopping hell. I was recently  
up in northern Idaho, where my family has owned a beautiful house on  
a lake in a tiny burg near the Canadian border for 40 years, and to  
get to this region you must pass through the explosively grown resort  
town of Coeur d'Alene, and the plague is there perhaps worse than  
anywhere within a 75-mile radius.

I am officially old enough to remember when passing through Coeur  
d'Alene meant stopping at exactly one -- one -- traffic light on  
Highway 95 on the way north, surrounded by roughly one million pine  
trees and breathtaking mountain vistas and vast, calming open spaces,  
farms and fields and sawmills and funky roadside shops and gorgeous  
lakes for miles.

There are now about 20 traffic lights added in as many years,  
scattered down a 10-mile stretch of highway and each and every one  
demarcates a turnoff into a massive low-lying horribly designed strip  
mall, tacky and cheaply built and utterly heartless, and clearly zero  
planning went into any of these megashops, except to space them so  
obnoxiously that you have to get back in your goddamn car to drive  
the eighth of a mile to get to the Target to the Best Buy to the Wal- 
Mart to the Super Foods and back to your freakin' sanity.

more at:  (Full URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/ 
archive/2005/08/17/notes081705.DTL&nl=fix)
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