Randy Smith: The nature of things

With our local bookseller Randy Smith's permission, I'm reprinting the following, which first apepared on his Blog (http://destinationsbooksellers.blogspot.com/) on Thursday, December 30, 2004.

It is as succinct an expression as I've found of the first principles of the journey upon which so many of us have embarked.

Take it away, Randy ...

The nature of things

The next time you lament the passing of a tradition or the loss of a historic landmark, the next time you remember a favorite haunt and realize that memory is all you have because the place just ain't there anymore, ponder this: Did you do anything to prevent the passing? to prevent the loss? to preserve the place and not just the memory?

We're living in a society that honors ends rather than means. If a historic building gets torn down or defaced to make way for "progress," it seems we accept that as being for the best. If a faceless corporate entity uses predatory tactics to destroy competition, that seems to be OK. We, as a society, have replaced worship of a deity with a worship of market forces.

Are we willing to trade in what's unique about our town for a one-size-fits-all cultural uniformity? Should New Albany, Indiana be little different from New Albany, Ohio or Albany, New York? Some people would actively say "yes" and promote that end. But far too many of us would instinctively say "no" and then proceed to enable the promoters of monoculture.

In Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle For Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart, by Liza Featherstone, a comment is made that Sam Walton built his mercantile empire by targeting poor people and that his corporate heirs rely on keeping people poor in order to thrive. That came from an activist trying to boost wages, and others have made the case that society as a whole benefits from Wal-Mart's lower prices, even if that means your local clothier, your local hardware store, your local auto parts store, and your local textile factory go out of business while your county's median income plummets.

If you worship markets, that's OK. Those local businesses must have been "inefficient." We must be better off with one store to shop at. It must be a good thing to have the same restaurants available wherever we go.

But the facts show that it's not OK. Civic Economics just released its latest survey of local businesses in comparison to chains. Ironically, their Web site domain name seems to have been bought up (by whom?) in just the last few weeks. Could it be that the study is being repressed?

Their analysis of retailers in Andersonville, Ill., a Chicago suburb, showed that for every $100 spent at a local retailer, an additional $73 is returned to the local economy. Chain retailers returned only an additional $43. The study further showed that when it came to efficiency, local retailers were about 2 percentage points more efficient than the chains.

As you watch your local economy transform, do you like what you see? Do you want more of your money to leave town, thus accelerating a downward economic spiral? Did you know you get to vote on this?

That's right. Every time you make a purchase, you are casting a vote. Vote for monoculture and absentee ownership of your local merchants. Or not.

It all comes down to how you frame the debate. If the "given" is that dominant players are by definition "good," then the means by which the winners win is irrelevant. John Yarmuth, columnist for the Louisville Eccentric Observer (LEO at http://www.leoweekly.com/), makes telling comment this week about framing. Josh Marshall does likewise in his blog, Talking Points Memo (http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/).

You'd think all this bloviating stemmed from pure self-interest. After all, I'm a new local retailer in competition with corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, and Kroger, not to mention the Killer B's of the bookstore business. But that's not where I'm coming from.

I'm afraid we're about to lose an important part of our local culture, just like we lost Hawley-Cooke a few years ago. Last night, I checked out the drop boxes for LEO and its primary competition, Velocity. By 9 p.m., the LEO box was almost empty. Velocity, its much more ubiquitous competitor, had an overflow of copies. You might think that showed LEO to be more successful, more in demand.

Not so, from what I can gather. Could it be that the dominant print medium, owned by the newspaper giant Gannett, is using profits from other publications to subsidize Velocity in order to really put the hurt on the true alternative weekly? There was a time when such predations were considered illegal. Lawmakers and citizens still maintain a de jure ban on same, even including treble damages for such anti-competitive, anti-consumer activities.

Pick up a copy of LEO, if you can find one. It's a FREE publication, after all. We have a few copies here at the store. Patronize its advertisers and be sure to tell them you saw their ads in LEO. I, for one, consider it to be one of the good things about our town. We'll miss it if it goes away. Just like we miss all those good things that are only memories today.

And while you're at it, think again about that decision to take only one newspaper. Does a regional daily have any incentive to truly cover New Albany? Georgetown? Jeffersonville? Would its readers in Bullitt County even care to know what cultural events are going on in Southeast Indiana? The Tribune, The Evening News, and The Democrat, among others, provide us with that sense of community we need desperately. I've chosen to make Southeast Indiana my home and the home for my business. What happens here matters.