Someone posted a “ha ha” graphic meme on Facebook earlier today (for all I know it’s been making the rounds for ages, but this is the first time I saw it) that read, “Walmart is closing 269 stores in 2016, putting 14 cashiers out of work.” Ha ha ha ha blah.
My wife shops there a lot, mostly for groceries, but I hate the place. On the other hand, I hate Target and Meijer, too, their only competition around here. Which brings me to trying to define why I hate them, because Target stores are generally clean and well-lit, Meijer stores try to keep up with Target (in my experience), and Walmart stores are just disgusting and make me want to pack my .45 and sling an AR-15 over my shoulder when I go in.*
I feel the same way about big box hardware stores, too, Lowe’s and Home Depot (which I invariably call “Home Despot”), but I can at least partly quantify why. I used to love the old time, small-town, privately-owned hardware stores, the ones with the wood plank floors and the narrow aisles packed with any conceivable thing someone might need to fix or replace something, or simply add to their possessions. You could buy nails by the pound in a paper sack, weighed out on an old balance scale that might have been purchased by the current owner’s great-grandfather, root through the drawers that contained all kinds of odd fasteners and bolts and nuts, might find a small toy section, definitely would find kitchen goods, paint, wallpaper, guns (!) and ammo (!), maybe even some dynamite (!!!) for blasting that stubborn stump out of the back 40. And the smells were indescribable. Sawdust and rubber and paint and oil and kerosene (which was hopefully outside) and any number of other things.
The last hardware like that in Indianapolis that I was aware of was the old Handy Hardware on Guilford Avenue in Broad Ripple. I think when Broad Ripple got trendy, they moved out of there and over to a building at 54th and Keystone, but I don’t know if they’re still in business. (Fox’s Deli was next door. You’d go have lunch and then go to the hardware, then back to work.) But there were plenty of those old hardware stores out in the boonies in northern Indiana when I was growing up and traveling around with Dad, working on people’s furnaces and maybe installing their first central air conditioning. (We did a lot of the latter in the early 1970’s.)
Like so many things, those days have passed. I think of those days as the last truly civilized period during which I’ve had the privilege to live. Since then, so much retail has turned into national or regional big boxes that slowly but surely put local business out of business. And I’m sad to say that shopping in a Lowe’s or a Home Depot is not the same as shopping at Handy Hardware, or the old Ace Hardware that used to be in New Augusta Plaza, or any of the little small-town hardwares I visited back when I was a teen. And our civilization is the worse for it, because you no longer know the owner, and no longer have any real community connection to the place. Instead, you have faceless sales drones who probably don’t really know anything about what they’re selling, and who are just itching for the end of their shift so they can go home and watch cable or surf the web.
The other night, my wife and I got to attend a baseball game at our local AAA park. We were there as guests of the local medical school dean, because I’m on a board that gives the med school a big donation every year to help fund research into an “orphan” disease. This was one of the ways that the school shows its gratitude to us (they also threw a splendid lunch for us some months back when we presented them with the check, and they’re always happy to send the researcher whose work we’re subsidizing to talk to our general membership about his work). As we sat at the park eating the seriously good food that had been laid on for the med school, I thought to myself that here was community. We don’t just hand over a big check every year to a faceless administrator. The dean spends time with us and makes sure that we have everything we need. His staff do the same. They are genuine people who are genuinely trying to make a difference in a crazy world that looks to be getting even crazier by the day. They provide grounding, and knowledge that we can still truly do good work despite the craziness.
And that’s what the old mom-and-pop stores and diners and gas stations and other small businesses in small towns all over the state used to do. They provided grounding. They were community. They knew you, and you knew them.
So many people are no longer grounded in our communities. Is it any wonder that we see our communities decivilizing before our eyes?
I don’t think so.
These are the Crazy Years.
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* For my own defense, in case Homeland Security is reading this. People in Walmarts can be nuts, you know.