[Vision2020] big box stores?

[Joan Opyr]

Excellent piece, Bill Bonte.  Thank you for posting it.  One thing 
about Couer d'Alene -- unless you're driving through town on your way 
somewhere north, you can avoid that strip mall hell just by sticking to 
the old downtown.  Take the first exit onto CdA's main drag, parallel 
park your car, get out and walk.  The old downtown is still lovely and 
unique.  Many excellent antique stores, good restaurants (there's a 
great Greek place one block up from the Penny Candy store), a terrific 
bookstore, and, lest we forget, there's the lake.  There is no better 
place to swim on a hot summer's day than in cool lake water.  Even when 
the swimming areas are crowded, lake water never gets gross like the 
pool water at the Hamilton-Lowe Aquatic Center.  No boogers, no hair, 
and no matter if all the kids in it are peeing . . . Lake Couer d'Alene 
is big enough to take it.  I love lake swimming.

On a related note (sort of), one of the many wretched things I 
experienced in New Orleans was shopping at an abandoned strip mall.  
Only one big box store remained, a Dillard's; I went in to buy shirts 
and underwear because the airline had lost my luggage.  If I hadn't 
been desperate, I would never have stopped.  Everything else in the 
mall had closed.  The massive parking lot was cracked and overgrown 
with weeds, the empty stores were boarded up and covered in graffiti; 
it looked like the aftermath of World War III.  I didn't think anything 
could look worse than a hot, bustling strip mall with a heat-sink 
parking lot, but I was wrong.  An abandoned strip mall is far worse.  
How much better to live in a town with real character, like Moscow?  
How much better to shop on our Main Street or at Spence Hardware or at 
Tri-State (Idaho's Most Interesting Store)?

Do not ask for whom the Wal-Mart Supercenter tolls; it tolls for thee.

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment
www.auntie-establishment.com