habilis
Ministry of Re-Education
I'm relatively young, 28, but I can remember when I was a kid growing up, there was plenty of little "Mom-n-Pop" shops all over the place. All different names, lots of variety in the stores, lots of friendly store owners, very good service, and nice people as a whole.
My, how things have changed since then. I still live in the same area and basically what's happened over the last 20 years is what I call the "Mini-Market Hostile Takeover". We have 1 choice now. CVS. CVS is the eastern equivalent of Wallmart. There is now a CVS on EVERY major intersection. They do this to completely smother out any competition, and they even compete with themselves purposely so when 1 of the stores business is doing bad, they sell it to a business that will not compete with them. An example of this was when they had 3 stores on the same street within a less then 1 mile stretch. They were all competeing against each other, then the one in the middle got closed and they sold it to a dry cleaners. It's a market strangulation very much like the deregulation of radio and the chokehold Clearchannel now has on the music industry.
This wouldn't be so bad if the the service was decent, but it sucks, and the people are all very unfriendly in these homogenized chains. The people who work there don't seem to care so much, and why not, it's not like any of them own the store.
the same goes for the grocery store's. They aren't even called grocery stores anymore because what they are now is mega-markets. We have one chain that has gobbled up everything else, called Giant Eagle, in these Mega-markets you can find EVERYTHING you will need. They have clothing, electronics, tools, housewares, sporting goods, books, movies, cd's, a full-service grocery store, and even guns all in 1 giant room, under 1 roof. It wont suprise me to see that these stores are all that exist in 25 more years. There's 2 or 3 in this area and they act like a cancer, sucking the revenue and lifeblood out of any competing outlet within miles.
More and more power, falling into fewer and fewer hands. How interesting.
We sold our souls to the devil to save a few bucks.
My, how things have changed since then. I still live in the same area and basically what's happened over the last 20 years is what I call the "Mini-Market Hostile Takeover". We have 1 choice now. CVS. CVS is the eastern equivalent of Wallmart. There is now a CVS on EVERY major intersection. They do this to completely smother out any competition, and they even compete with themselves purposely so when 1 of the stores business is doing bad, they sell it to a business that will not compete with them. An example of this was when they had 3 stores on the same street within a less then 1 mile stretch. They were all competeing against each other, then the one in the middle got closed and they sold it to a dry cleaners. It's a market strangulation very much like the deregulation of radio and the chokehold Clearchannel now has on the music industry.
This wouldn't be so bad if the the service was decent, but it sucks, and the people are all very unfriendly in these homogenized chains. The people who work there don't seem to care so much, and why not, it's not like any of them own the store.
the same goes for the grocery store's. They aren't even called grocery stores anymore because what they are now is mega-markets. We have one chain that has gobbled up everything else, called Giant Eagle, in these Mega-markets you can find EVERYTHING you will need. They have clothing, electronics, tools, housewares, sporting goods, books, movies, cd's, a full-service grocery store, and even guns all in 1 giant room, under 1 roof. It wont suprise me to see that these stores are all that exist in 25 more years. There's 2 or 3 in this area and they act like a cancer, sucking the revenue and lifeblood out of any competing outlet within miles.
More and more power, falling into fewer and fewer hands. How interesting.
We sold our souls to the devil to save a few bucks.
