<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Are big box stores in our future? Let's hope not! The following appeared in SFGate:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Geneva; min-height: 19px; "><BR></DIV><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 13.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="6"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 24px;"><B>D</B></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">o 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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 13.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 13.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 13.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 13.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 13.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">I am officially old enough to remember when passing through Coeur d'Alene meant stopping at exactly one -- </SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"><I>one</I></SPAN></FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;"> -- 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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 13.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">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.</SPAN></FONT></P><P style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 13.0px 0.0px"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" size="3"><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px;">more at: </SPAN></FONT>(Full URL: <A href="http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2005/08/17/notes081705.DTL&nl=fix"><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0021E5">http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2005/08/17/notes081705.DTL&nl=fix</FONT></A>)</P></BODY></HTML>