Tom Perrotta as quoted today in Richard Russo’s NYT op-ed “Amazon’s Jungle Logic”:“People have to understand that their short-term decision to save a couple bucks undermines their long-term interest in their community and vital, real-life literary culture.”
It’s one the things I feel most frustrated by and powerless to affect except on a personal scale, how online shopping and warehouse big-box retail accelerate the automobile age tendency away from places that feel like distinct places toward non-places, interchangeable appendages off highways. Town and city centers with local stores were once necessities, the variegated, satisfying experience of them a happy accidental consequence of the limits of getting around by foot and by train. “Buy local” risks ossifying that experience into theme park visits for those who can afford them. But if a critical mass makes small retail viable, isn’t it then as real as anything else? Why is “buy cheapest” any realer than other desires (at least for non-essentials, i.e. most of the things Amazon sells)? Apple, Starbucks, Whole Foods, as mockable, corporate, in some many ways evil as they are, prospered by not joining in the race to the bottom; by being, by and large, just cheap enough. Also, unfortunately, by not being local. Small businesses, no matter what they sell, are often only one or two bad quarters away from closing.
