Box Stores In Key West

Every Monday morning I turn to the delightfully titled "Clusterfuck Nation" blog published by Jim Kunstler who lives in up state New York. He has a particularly jaundiced view of modern life which he feels sure is about to implode on the reefs of high energy costs and suburban sprawl, an architectural style which gives him heartburn. I read this week's Monday Morning Essay with a particular Key West perspective, noting the plans for a large strip mall to be built on Rockland Key, a plan whose size is in contention between the county and the developers, and whose occupants are yet to be decided, but whose construction seems to be guarenteed. It is a shopping plan that fits perfectly into Kunstler's nightmare scenario, subtracting from the stores in Key West and requiring driving from this city which is relatively well adapted to cycling and walking (and even modest moped riding!).

Scale Implosion

By James Howard Kunstler

on February 18, 2013 9:06 AM

 

Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle. The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won -- for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).

The chain stores won not only because they flung money around -- sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials -- but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry. The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though?

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: people get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic.

The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them. Diesel fuel prices are heading well north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye to the "warehouse on wheels" distribution method. (The truckers, who are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the re-po men come to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.) Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to keep the credit revolving.

Then there is the matter of the American customers themselves. The WalMart shoppers are exactly the demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy. Unlike the Federal Reserve, WalMart shoppers can't print their own money, and they can't bundle their MasterCard and Visa debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick profits. They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience.

The potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this burgeoning dynamic. But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies. At this stage it is probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel helpless. In a town like the old factory village I live in (population 2500) few of the few remaining young adults might venture to open a retail operation in one of the dozen-odd vacant storefronts on Main Street. The presence of K-Mart, Tractor Supply, and Radio Shack a quarter mile west in the strip mall would seem to mock their dim inklings that something is in the wind. But K-Mart will close over 200 boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500 stores. They could be gone in this town well before Santa Claus starts checking his lists. If they go down, opportunities will blossom. There will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase of our history is over.

What we're on the brink of is scale implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy. I hope young people recognize this and can marshal their enthusiasm to get to work. It's already happening in the local farming scene; now it needs to happen in a commercial economy that will support local agriculture.

The additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles and social relations in every American community. On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. We can get that all back, but it won't be a bargain.

http://kunstler.com/blog/

A Comment on Health Care

Every Monday morning J H Kunstler publishes an essay in his blog called Clusterfuck Nation. I recommend it as, whether or not he hits the mark, his writing is always provocative and entertaining. This week he took on health care reform, surprisingly from a very anti-Republican angle. He isn't usually so decisive, even though one would never accuse Kunstler of being Pro-Democrat! Kunstler's world view could be summed up as expecting a decisive economic slide into poverty and limited technological resources for the US and anyone riding on the Empire's coattails. From this week's blog I read this rather cogent comment from someone called Jeff, who offered a personal insight into the US's health insurance mess that resonated with me. This is not a comment by the author of the blog (a link to that is at the end of the page):

I found the summit very useful, not just for exposing transparently obstructionist Republican tactics of the "let's just start over" (repeated ad nauseam) sort but also for laying out some honest-to-goodness policy differences. The mainstream media seemed to willfully ignore those, in favor flogging some personality driven sniping, of which there was actually comparatively little, the better to convey the meeting as some kind of demeaning, reality TV show.

Of the substantive differences, perhaps one of the most telling: Republicans object to the Obama plan in part on grounds of defending Medicare. When you hear a Republican defending Medicare, your bullshit antenna should go up, you should cover your nuts and grab your wallet (not necessarily in that order.) It became apparent that what they really meant is they want to protect Medicare C (aka "Medicare Advantage" plans.) I learned what these things are the hard way recently, by doing bureaucratic battle to get my geriatric father's Medicare advantage coverage accepted by a prominent national cancer center. In a nutshell, these things are private insurance market policies which "replace" the insured's Medicare, plus (in theory) provide a little additional coverage like preventative services, gym memberships, etc., of the sort which are extremely cheap and very infrequently used by senior citizens. For this, the private insurers can charge policy holders additional premium over and above what Medicare would charge, they also get paid an incentive from the government of about 15%, and are permitted to allow doctors and hospitals to whack insured's for an additional chunk of the total bill.

The kicker? Doctors and hospitals are free to accept or reject the coverage on a visit by visit basis. Meaning the policy holder cannot know in advance (as they can with other types of policies which have networks of hospitals and doctors)where they'll be eligible to be treated.

This is what Republicans mean by "market based solutions." The whole experiment has been an unmitigated disaster - - except for the agents and insurers who've reaped huge profits from a previously untapped market. And for Republicans who found a back door way to undercut Medicare, and provide themselves with another example of how "big government" programs don't work. Think Grover Norquist's wet dream of shrinking government down to the size where it can be drowned in the bathtub.

http://www.kunstler.com/blog/