03-21-2020, 06:26 AM
(03-20-2020, 10:59 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: Yesterday I went to one of the relatively few remaining mom and pop sandwich shops to stock up in case we end up on lockdown. As I was going there I thought about the fact that when I was growing up in the 1950s mom and pop book stores, music stores, diners and pharmacies were abundant, and for the most part remained so through the 1970s. The owners and subordinates as well were usually quite friendly and if the store wasn’t busy you could stay and talk with them for a while. I personally developed friendships with some of them at the time. But by the 1980s they really began to fall like dominoes, ruthlessly gutted out of existence by chain stores and fast food franchises which were pretty much the same everywhere. Employees were monitored so heavily that it became virtually impossible to develop those kinds of friendships. On this thread I shall seek your feedback on the reasons for the decline and have chosen to make this multiple choice. So here goes:
a).That we have become a much more mobile society with many folks expecting to find the same stores and restaurants wherever they travel.
That is one way to level regional distinctions, but also a sure way to create a bland and boring universe. Paradoxically some chain restaurants have tried to redesign some of their locations to make them look less like cookie-cutter experiences. I think of "Chez Mac" in the South Bend-Elkhart area in which locations have gotten architectural upgrades even if the menu is identical in them all.
Road trips had become awful, especially if they used the Interstate, with a roadside stop in Midland, Michigan being similar to one in Midland, Texas (strictly speaking, US 10 in Midland, Michigan is not an Interstate but is up to Interstate standard. OK, so there are funky diners and bars... one must go looking for them. I enjoy a craft brewery for its distinctive quaffs that I could never compare to mass-market beers).
OK, a place is interesting if it has a local history or remarkable scenery... it is not the 1970's any more when Americans were delighted to count off the miles on a rural Interstate in Illinois because such a highway seemed like a miracle. We take such for granted now.
Quote:b). That big business has thoroughly brainwashed the public into thinking that they could do it all better.
One word: advertising. In general, the more witless the product or attraction, the lower must be the level of communication to make such attractive to a mass market. This said, advertising on golf programs (golf gets small audiences for television but it reacts a non-mass audience that offers viewers with high-SES in contrast to most television) seems no more clever than what appears on schlock daytime television which has viewers either retired, unemployed, or doing shift work.
Big Business can advertise on television; mom-and-pop businesses can't.
Quote:c). That we have become a consistently more convenience obsessed world with each generation being more so than the last. Mom and pop operations usually can’t provide the same level of convenience that today’s society demands and expects.
Like many trends and fads, such goes only so far until it becomes stale and even repugnant. The craft brewery cannot advertise as can Anheuser-Busch (which used to be renowned for excellent advertising of a banal product). Maybe it is not so much unrefined taste as it is compromises that people make because they are poor. Face it -- the neo-liberal paradigm that has dominated American political and economic life demands mass poverty as a means of creating the extreme wealth of economic elites who justify their rapaciousness and administrative brutality on the ground that such unbelievable wealth will create such extreme wealth that nobody will need to be poor.
The only meaningful convenience these days is that the rich and powerful can grab a paycheck again at least as fast as a worker earns it. Thus "easy credit rip-offs" that have people over-paying for something obvious.
Quote:d). All of the above.
It could be that in the 1T, should economic disparities become less severe, some of the trends that you see will now become obsolete or even abominable. But so far you are right.
Quote:e). Something else.
The corporate income tax is much the same whether on a mom-and-pop business (a restaurant that nets an income of $150 K a year, which isn't all that much for a family of six that does the work there) or Exxon-Mobil. The tax system used to give a relative advantage to small businesses when large amounts of unearned income from interest and dividends were heavily taxed, and when business executives had not become similar to the exploitative nomenklatura of "socialist" states. I will be delighted to see the current paradigm come to an end with something saner, more equitable, and more sustainable replacing it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.