According to this story in the Wall Street Journal, Sears is on the verge of finally going out of business. For people under the age of forty, this is a meaningless event, as Sears has not been a part of the public consciousness for decades. For those old enough to remember, the early 1990’s was the last time Sears was an anchor store at malls and shopping centers. I think the last time I had a reason to shop at Sears was at the old Natick Mall in the 1990’s. I think I bought a kitchen item, but I no longer recall exactly.
The conventional telling of these stories says that the big retail stores were killed by some combination of Amazon and the internet. That’s mostly just myth-making as companies like Sears were struggling when Amazon was still just a river in Brazil. The big box store, as they came to be called, was always a bad idea that started to show signs of weakness in the 80’s. The logic of this type of retail is a race to the bottom, where margins are maintained by stripping out the value that is implicit in the local retail store concept.
Think of it this way. The local retailer does more than sell stuff. In practice, he stocks the things popular with his community and offers customer service to help his neighbors get the best product for their needs. He’s also going to sponsor the local little league teams and participate in the community. Big retail takes the social capital and the customer service and turns that into a quick profit for the chain store, by cutting prices at the retail side and purchasing power on the supply side. It’s a form of economic piracy.
This model works fine until all of the local competition is gone. At that point it is a battle of soulless wholesalers operating out of warehouse style facilities. The only competition between a Sears and a K-Mart, another defunct chain, was price and location. One thing that is certain about a race to the bottom is that everyone eventually reaches the finish line and for big retail that has meant bankruptcy. You see this with Amazon. Their retailing arm is the marketing expense for their media and technology services now.
This is why conservatives used to be skeptical of capitalism. They correctly saw the reality of large scale retail. It was not that the big retailer was better at selling product or provided a better service. In fact, it has always been the obvious. If you go to your local Home Depot, for example, you are unlikely to get any help from the staff, unless you tackle one of them in the aisle. Even then, the quality of service is so poor, you are better off not asking for help. Big retail turns customer service into a net negative.
Big retail operates as a parasite through false economy. It’s a form of cost shifting, where the loss of social capital and customer service is pushed into the distance, while the cheap prices are in the present. The Old Right understood the corrosive nature of this form of retail and opposed it. Today, everyone laments the loss of local retail and the town shopping district. We’re told it is the result of Amazon being a better choice, but in reality the cause is the willingness of our leaders to auction off our social capital.
Another example of this is the local industrial supply store. Electrical wholesale, welding supplies, HVAC wholesalers and other business that served the trades used to be locally owned family businesses. They were never wildly profitable, but they provided a nice living as a family business. Fred’s Welding Supply would sponsor a little league team, while Fred participated in the community and sent his kids to the local schools. Sometimes one guy would own a couple of stores if his town or city was big enough to support it.
Today, these businesses have been bought up by investment firms powered by credit money from investors. An investment firm gets set up and they bankroll one bigger player as he buys up all of the competitors. The “economies of scale” are that the owners are removed, the accounting and sales staff is centralized and the social capital is carted off to the investors as profit. The customers may get a small break in price, but usually the only thing they notice is the staff now treat them like strangers, rather than neighbors.
Libertarians and “conservatives” will read this and reflexively start chirping about free markets and invisible hands, but there is a reason they are now a punchline. That’s because these are ideologies, if you want to be generous and elevate them to ideologies, that make all the same assumptions about humanity as the Marxists. That is, they see man as the ultimate consumer, a beast that devours his environment, in the same way a plague of locusts wipes out a field. Whittaker Chambers explained this 60 years ago.
Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man’s fate, without God, is up to him, and to him alone. His happiness, in strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand’s words, “the moral purpose of his life.” Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist Socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit. No doubt, Miss Rand has brooded upon that little rub. Hence, in part, I presume, her insistence on “man as a heroic being” “with productive achievement as his noblest activity.” For, if Man’s “heroism” (some will prefer to say: “human dignity”) no longer derives from God, or is not a function of that godless integrity which was a root of Nietzsche’s anguish, then Man becomes merely the most consuming of animals, with glut as the condition of his happiness and its replenishment his foremost activity. So Randian Man, at least in his ruling caste, has to be held “heroic” in order not to be beastly. And this, of course, suits the author’s economics and the politics that must arise from them.
A life with no other purpose than to work and consume is actually lower than beastly, because the beast in the field only eats to live. It does not live to eat. Like all living things, it lives to make more copies of itself. For man, possessed of a self-awareness and the capacity to remake his environment, the purpose of life expands to the celebration of life by not only reproducing but leaving a cultural legacy for the next generation. The point of life is for old men to plant trees in whose shade they will never stand.
The auctioning off of our social capital has corresponded with the startling spike in suicide rates. Cosmopolitan globalism and the transactional consumerism that drives it, strips people of their humanity. Like drug addicts, they no longer have the capacity to experience the normal pleasures. The heroin addict is always faced with the choice. Give up the junk and became whole again or take the easy way out. That’s what faces the people of the modern West. The choice is revolt against modernity or amuse ourselves to death.
This post has already been linked to 4349 times!
(((They’re))) out to remove us. Societal cost shifting leaves zero doubt nevermind the narrative. Prevail or die. Because you will.
The shopping mall, Press F, is interesting in that all four of the department stores were in the same place, and so had incentive to ensure that none of them eliminated the other. One lost anchor store in a mall causes a domino effect. Very cartel-like behavior that lolbertarians never seemed to notice, not as if the mall developers weren’t deep pocketed. Some may recall the name DeBartolo, before my time.
The mall represents a fake community, and the new “town centers” represent an astroturf community. Amazon isn’t a community at all.
The owner of Sears is a Jewish finance guy that is an Ayn Rand fanatic.
The results were almost preordained.
Sears is a corporation and “owned” by its shareholders. The CEO, Eddie Lampert is not the owner. Sears was started in 1983. How many retail consumer companies do you know that last 125 years? If you are a businessman like I am you will understand that everything has a beginning and an end. Every business has its Bell Curve. Markets change, tastes change. Shit happens. Songle changes can be anticipated some not. Some businesses can change with them some not. But no business will be able to change with all of them. A business just like a frog, a car,… Read more »
Damn good run, I say.
And the first recognizable escalator in 1899.
Sears, of course, was the Amazon of its day, Imagine the damage done to local handymen and laborers and trades by its mail order catalog- where you could buy a ready to assemble house.
Sears is part and parcel old school America. The one that existed before malls and big box stores where the white blue collar and middle-class family shopped at during the weekend. Same applied to Kmart. The arrival of Wal-Mart and the other big box stores meant vicious throat cutting competition it couldn’t compete against and survive. The big boxes took out a lot of smaller chains and independents as well. I watched our town center up and die as Wal-Mart and Home Deport got going. Stores that were there on main street for he last 30 years went poof. Another… Read more »
Sears was founded as a way to undercut the “general dry goods store” in each small town circa the late 19th century. Department stores happened due to the rural population decline after 1920.
Allstate, Discover and Coldwell Banker were all spun off of Sears due to Wall Street pressure in the 90s. US finance hates this kind of organization that is very common in Japan, the infamous zaibatsu.
In short, Sears was the original Pre-Internet Amazon, in that their business model was warehouse-to-consumer via the Postal service BEFORE they opened up retail outlets.
Ah, I see I stepped on your point, sorry.
Then Sears took advantage of the completed small rail network, just as Walmart did with interstate trucking or China and container shipping.
What a black pill here. My dad retired from Sears as an appliance repairman many years ago. Last of the decent salaries ever seen there since. There are a few stalwart family hardware stores near me, to my amazement.
I have had my fill of libertarians (even paleo), Austrian economists and every person that uses that shit term heroic when describing economic man. Progressives? They are nothing.
For the most part we are truly consumerist meat sticks. If Dawkins has his way, that won’t even be a metaphor.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5499911/amp/Richard-Dawkins-claims-eat-lab-grown-human-meat.html
I know people who raised families and retired comfortably from Sears – way back in the day. Appliance salesmen. Sadly those days ended in the early 90’s.
And I know a guy who raised a family and retired comfortably as a milk man. Times change, like I said.
Note to Richard Dawkins: Soylent Green is people!!
At the local Ace Hardware the staff will help you find the right fastener(s) from a stellar array. I hope they stay around.
Agree
Capitalism is merely functional and efficient, but no less corrosive than Socialism. While Libertarians will rail if Washington DC became communist and controlled local business, they will cheer if Wall Street does so (especially if the stock indicies ascend). But does it matter if the local school team is abandoned by Moscow on the Potomac or Wall Street? The free market is efficient, but amoral. There is either no justice, or the warped rules of first party voluntary exchange (toxic waste disposed of in the local river is third party). The Founding Fathers recognized Government as a fire that needed… Read more »
There is NO ‘Free Market’ and FUSSA is functionally a communist country; read Boston T. Party’s/Kenneth Royce’s “Goodbye April 15th!” the section on the commie manifesto and take note of how many of the 10 planks have been successfully adopted and energized into ‘normal day to day government functioning’. And it’s no good to run about crying, “muhh cuntstipooption!!…we need to get back to the cuntstipooption for ‘murica to be fixed!!” as that document has been proven to be a intentionally contrived criminal fraud by a. hamilton and his ‘founding lawyer/bankster friends and supporters (Aaron Burr had exactly the right… Read more »
Longest surviving written constitution since the Twelve Tables. Not too shabby. I’ll take that and raise you an incoherent rant.
Joe Sobran: ‘ As I sometimes put it, the U.S. Constitution poses no serious threat to our form of government.
Most revolutions are powered by appeals to ancient rights or forms. That parchment may save our grandkids asses some day.
It has no power. People do but no longer exercise it out of selfishness. Do you see a uprising to stop the Sacker familiy from flooding the country with Oxycontin? No.
Do you see the people getting in the face of Ryan and McConnell to put a end to the censorious crap pulled by Silicon Valley? Nope, just a big yawn.
Or the Chambers of Commerce keeping our boarders wide open? Again nothing.
It has no power. People do but no longer exercise it out of selfishness.
Only when they have the organized numbers though… Which I don’t know why the right can’t figure that out…
Right. Homo sapiens has been reduced to Homo economicus. Rather than growing up and learning to deal with the existential challenges of life, we are reduced to choosing among big-box stores and products. I am continually amazed by the length, depth, and sophistication of many product reviews on Amazon.com, versus the ignorance and thoughtlessness of people’s political, social, and philosophical views. Some years ago there was a popular bumper sticker: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Toys — whether they are rubber ducks or game consoles — appeal to children of all ages. And that’s fine with governments… Read more »
In my teenage years, I worked at a dying big box retailer and I remember, without a hint of irony, everyone talking shit about how Walmart was putting all the medium sized big box retailers out of business.
Also at this point, I think I despise libertarians more than communists.
libertarians (small l) and anarchists/voluntarists won’t kill harm or kill you as we have a “live and let live” approach to life and do abide by the Zero Aggression Principle…read Larken Rose’s “Most Dangerous Superstition” and “The Iron Web” and check out his numerous videos on youtube. collectivists, whether they call themselves commies, republocrappers, demoturds, socialists (commies without the balls to grab the AK47 and go for it..yet, yes this describes that freeze dried commie bernie sanders and his pathetic followers) and “Large L” ‘libertarians’ (really republocrappers without the parasite class’s funding but still want to grab for the ‘Ring… Read more »
Always funny to hear the unhinged rantings of lolbertardians about those “collectivists”. They all seem to think that Horatio Alger was a real person.
Meanwhile, in the real world, anyone with a functioning brain can see that humans are a species that evolved as collective groups(there are species that actually are individualistic out there for comparison too), with radical selfish individualism being largely a deathwish for most our history.
But you know, boot straps, muh chamber of commerce, etc.
They have never been in a position to kill large numbers of people. What they would do if they were in such a position is an unknown.
Sometimes simple things can make a difference. At Sears there were no shopping carts and cash registers were located in different sections of the store. So you tended to purchase your one or two items at one section of Sears and leave and then maybe shop at some of the other stores at the shopping mall, which wouldn’t be conducive to pushing a shopping cart through the mall. At Walmart you filled your shopping cart with items from all over the store and paid for them at the checkout, located all in one place, near the doors.
Another critical aspect of the killing of small business is local government with their excessive regulations, red tape, and their overall sluggishness. It is very difficult and very frustrating to deal with byzantine rules that are seemingly designed to kill off organic business growth. Meanwhile, the federal government is subsidizing Amazon by covering a sizable portion of their costs for delivering packages on Sunday. To add insult to injury, government subsidized small business loans are handed out like candy to minorities who abuse the system and rip the public off. Modern day business is seemingly designed only for large businesses… Read more »
I think you get right at the core of the thing with this post, Zman. But I really don’t know anyone from the managerial class who would give up all of their material bennies for more community. Many are in fact down-right hostile to the concept of community and seem to associate it with patriarchy, choking conformity, and their own miserable adolescences. Speaking of Nietzsche, he was convinced that taking the 90% of us humans who had been in some sort of bondage since the late neolithic, and making us into citizens would lead to some Very Bad Things. These… Read more »
Sears became, not a retailer of merchandise, but a creator of contracts paying a high rate of interest. If you had money, you bought the washing machine somewhere else, where it was cheaper. If you didn’t have money, you paid more at Sears, but were allowed to put it on credit. Eddie Lampert, supposedly the smartest man in the room, couldn’t turn it around, but he personally is emerging in good financial shape, unlike the rest of the shareholders. All the buying and selling of stuff isn’t what it’s all about. Whitman said “The kelson of creation is love.” He… Read more »
If capitalism is your economic choice, well and good. If capitalism is your theology, you will fall heir to the exact same mistake Marxism makes: that man, and his existence, is ultimately existential materialism. Adam Smith wasn’t wrong, the trouble moves in when people try to use capitalistic “pursuit of happiness” to functionally only encompass material possessions and one’s own pleasure. You have to first take the Jeffersonian-Bible approach, and take out any thought that the best things in life aren’t things. Money isn’t the root of all evil. “The love of money is the root of all evil.” is… Read more »
Jefferson invented “pursuit of happiness”, It isn’t a capitalistic goal. The correct terms were Locke’s “Life, Liberty, and Property”, but Jefferson had trouble envisioning “property” as a God given right, so he improvised to make it fit his narrative. Perhaps some of the difficulties with “Capitalism” stem from the legal fiction of the Corporation, Mike Mansfield, Senator from Montana years ago, said :”No ass to kick, no soul to damn, that’s the Corporation”. He had a point. Still, property rights and the freedom to exchange with each other is the genesis of prosperity, lets not drown the goose in the… Read more »
Over the years I’ve read a fair number of economics articles looking at scale economies in different industries. It’s weird, but with exceptions like electricity generation, they don’t much exist. Trucking, grocery stores, package delivery, hospitals, etc. UPS, for example, keeps making this stupid mistake. They think Amazon volume is awesome because they figure it just helps their scale economies so much that, basically, they pay Amazon for the privilege of delivering their stuff. Amazing. Same thing with industries like banking. The economies of scale there might be that larger firms can manage having the entire staff living in India… Read more »
One mans pirate is another mans privateer.
Sears owns much of the real estate under their stores. Also you wrote how Sears and K-Mart are competitors. Not so much. I’m not sure who owns who but it is the fucked-up management that ruined K-mart who is also managing Sears. Back in the 90’s K-Mart came out with a new agenda, they weren’t going to sell guns or ammo any longer. Within a year almost every K-mart was tit’s up in Texas. If you want to suck up to globalists, you won’t make it in Texas. We still have some Sears hanging on around the State, but remember,… Read more »
“Back in the 90’s K-Mart came out with a new agenda, they weren’t going to sell guns or ammo any longer. Within a year almost every K-mart was tit’s up in Texas.”
dicks and other vendors are beginning to learn that lesson the hard way as well after the FF Parkland “shooting”; Springfield Armory among others just said “FU dicks!!” and kicked them to the curb as have a lot of former customers…enough that they’re worried about their “bottom line”.
Actually, Sears has owned K-Mart since 2004. So no competition there, either.
Actually K-Mart bought Sears, The merged company traded under the Sears name for marketing purposes.
http://money.cnn.com/2004/11/17/news/fortune500/sears_kmart/
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6509683/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/t/kmart-acquire-sears-billion-deal/
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/mar/25/business/fi-sears25
When Lampert bought Sears some years ago, there was considerable speculation in the Chicago press that he was doing it simply to acquire the real estate. I certainly don’t know what his motivations were, but it does seem that he’s tried to keep the ship afloat.
Communism and Capitalism are ending up at the same destination, with monopolies owned by “the people” but run by a managerial class.
Actually that is fascism, at least from the former Italian ‘expert’ that was just hanging around with his pals after the “war to save joe stalin/communism”.
No different from what “frank the gimp” roosevelt enslaved the fussa to..and he had commies like harry hopkins and alger hiss among others working right beside him.
Joe McCarthy was more right than we know!!
Joe McCarthy was dead-on. That’s why he is hated by ALL the Establishment, ALL the colleges (with maybe 2 exceptions) and EVERY member of the MSM.
you wrote:
“in reality the cause is the willingness of our leaders to auction off our social capital.”
————–
But why? Because our leaders are getting rich off of insider stock tips and access to IPOs…
the gop congress hides behind mcconnell and ryan, who take the heat while the gop congress does nothing to further the trump nationalist agenda…and the media helps them hide from the voters
There’s a surprising amount of trash talk in the comments criticizing libertarianism and capitalism. Libertarianism is basically “don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.” Capitalism is two people voluntarily exchanging goods or services because both benefit. So, where’s the beef with either of those? The Left confuses capitalism with cronyism (which ironically is enabled to a greater extent by leftist policies), and the criticisms of capitalism in these comments is similar. Capitalism isn’t some unsustainable soulless race-to-the-bottom cut throat multinational corporatism. For most of America’s history, capitalism worked just fine, with all of the important subtle nuances that are… Read more »
The free market most efficiently produces material prosperity. My complaint is when a capitalist insists that the free market must be the highest value. For example, I am willing to pay more for produce and manufactured goods that are produced by an American making a good wage. The capitalist will criticize my choice as not maximally efficient but misses my point. The community that is engendered by protectionism and restrictive immigration is qualitatively better even if it is not the most free market. Do we have an economy that serves our people or do our people serve the economy?
When one studies Austrian Economics as taught by Von Mises, Hayek, Rothbard and others, one understands that there is NO separation between the economy and people; we humans ARE the economy and the economy is merely another ecosystem that we inhabit.
When anyone unbalances an ecosystem it will ALWAYS create harm to those within it and the system will try to reset to a balanced state if it can.
Yes, there are certain tests that will flush out the collectivists/statists..they can’t seem to help popping up like the ‘whistle dogs’ here in Arizona when their ‘Matrix’ is questioned or threatened.
I tend to view the economy as analogous to a river. Everybody drinks from it, some enterprising souls will find creative ways to profit from it, some people will use it as a convenient way of disposing of trash or dead bodies, polluting it for everyone else. While I agree with the libertarians that a free market provides the most efficient distribution of resources, I disagree that maximum efficiency necessarily results in the most beneficial results. The reality is that the economy is a shared resource that, like the river, needs to be managed such that particular parties can’t pollute… Read more »
Yep, the piece is click-bait for all the closet-Collectivists.
And, they are Legion.
Saying ‘Libertarianism is basically “don’t hurt people and don’t take their stuff.”’ is like saying “Feminism is just giving women equal rights.” This may be what the dictionary says, but in practice, libertarianism, capitalism, and feminism lead to the social atomization that dissolves white communities and leaves us helpless before other organized ethnic groups.
There was an example in China some years back that I thought was an interesting test case for economic theory in practice. An overpass on one of their superhighway collapsed, and an investigation found that the concrete was not sound because the manufacturer of th concrete had been diluting it with garbage in order to increase volume at no cost, and bribing the local inspector to look the other way. In a true free market, the problem here was not the development of an inferior product to get an edge on the concrete contracting market, as building codes are a… Read more »
If the country you live in is rapidly destabilizing and everyone is collectivizing for safety, you’d be a fool to believe that ‘being nice to everyone’ will protect you or your family. I don’t hear anyone talking about the Bosnian libertarian, the Rhodesian libertarian, or the Syrian libertarian. I bet soon that the South African libertarian will be alive as long as it takes for the local ANC militia to come and respect his private property rights.
Exactly right…I don’t know why they can’t correlate that… Community will be our saving grace in terms of saving our culture…
Let’s not hyperventilate, libertarian within certain (White) norms. Libertarian global Kapitalism is what doesn’t scale.
Libertarian warmaking-being free to attack and pillage under some made-up ‘national security’ bullshit, or as a manufactured threat like ‘drug cartels’ or ‘white christian militias’- well, that doesn’t scale either.
Good essay, Z-man…The joy of living comes from interaction with 1) Nature in all its magnificence, and 2) other people, in person or through their works of art or craft, from Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Van Gogh to art work or choral singing from your local high school….Consumption and pleasure seeking cannot and will not sustain a person, but our evil culture pretends otherwise.
“the cause is the willingness of our leaders to auction off our social capital.”
I’m not so sure about that. I think us commoners have had a lot to do with it. If people kept shopping at small businesses the transition wouldn’t have taken place. The people abandoned small businesses to save a few bucks.
The truth of this post is undeniable, but it still hurts to hear malls being criticized. Not too long ago it’s where all us teenagers hung out on weekend nights. Most of my best junior high and high school memories happened in malls. Your parents could drop you off and feel ok about it. It was the perfect setting. Shelter from the elements. All night safety. Malls offered more strolling time and variety with a date or friends than you could ever get on the old time “mainstreet” or “soda shop” (before my time). On the social end of the… Read more »
I remember when you could smoke inside them. FREEDOM!
I worked at a mall movie theater 88-90. Everything you say, especially the girls. How many John Hughes movies are set there? It was implicitly white and we didn’t even know it; just like libertarianism.
Z, this is one of your best articles, it addresses the big picture. Man’s biggest fight is the one with himself. Biblical morality achieves a better outcome, but it comes only by denying the instant gratifications, of which are more easily available in the modern world.
” Biblical morality achieves a better outcome, but it comes only by denying the instant gratifications, of which are more easily available in the modern world.” Is this to say that people who happen to be Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Anamist or Neo-Pagan/Wiccan either don’t have or aren’t capable of being moral beings and living and interacting with others in a moral fashion? I’m a Neo-Pagan Witch, and live my life in a moral fashion that both honors my religion and honors and respects other individuals that I meet and interact with. I also have no problem with delaying personal gratification… Read more »
In other words, you’re White.
You don’t fall into Dinduism. Case in point, only Punjabi can be Sikh. Only a Hindu can be born Hindu. The religions were born and made in bloody times, in wars between racial cultures. First, one must quell the wars between one’s People.
One of the most important aspects of difference between local shop and big box is the accountability factor, which in turn explains the general decline in the quality of things. In the old days, if someone sold you a shoddy suit or wobbly table, that guy had to pass you on the street at least once a week or maybe once a day. Now, if something you buy breaks an hour after you got it, your only option is to get the run-around on a phone-tree manned by an army of Shaniquas more interested in tending their pedicures than addressing… Read more »
Progress. It’s just buffalo chips to me. The obsession with constant progress. Where a great invention is destroyed just to make room for a replacement touted as “a better, new, and improved, widget”. What you really get is mass produced, large volume crap. Much like everything China barffs up and sells to the starry eyed masses of dummies addicted to “the latest and greatest” whatever. Consumers are just that, consumers. Where did the well rounded, even keeled life go. It’s going full circle. We have to make what we need with our own two hands. If it’s to last long… Read more »
That’s all fine and dandy, but don’t worry, Amazon sells many of the base tools you need to survive without the system.
I’ve already given up on humanity. And now I feel little guilt about buying from Amazon or Walmart or whoever has the lowest price. I buy local when the price difference is small, or sometimes from worthy entrepreneurs at the farmer’s market. But the things I buy are purposeful, in preparation for the inevitable collapse, not fashion clothes, or TVs, or jet skiis. The money I save funds more preps or gets put into worthwhile assets, property, or escape plan B. Community is already a dead concept, and I am already over lamenting its demise.
Do you plan to survive the “inevitable collapse” without a community?
Just remember that no man is an island; the lone wolf will die (usually in a quite miserable fashion with much unecessary suffering). No matter how much you may try to escape it, we humans ARE social animals; even the most monkish of us needs SOME interaction with others. Read what Mountain Gorilla has to say about the importance of kith and kin, clan and tribe. In the upcoming unpleasantness, you will need them as much as they’ll need you…if nothing else to watch your back while you sleep or to deal with medical emergencies like if you suffer a… Read more »
One of your very best.
You are a “5 to 9 Conservative,” as all real Rightists are: https://www.counter-currents.com/2011/10/5-to-9-conservatism/
The market always wins. Capitalism has proven this hands down. Scream about WalMart to your heart’s content – but that is as good as it gets in today’s world. The Chinese, the Russians, and pretty much the entire second and third world would give their left nut to have it as good. As would your ancestors. The problem isn’t Walmart… it’s us. We are too stupid to see that the cheapest product is not the least expensive. Eg. 15 years ago I spent $200 on a pair of camping pants and a shirt. They were made by a local company… Read more »
Funny, but just last week finally wore out a pair of Filson shorts. Probably 15 years old. First of their products I’ve ever had to toss.
Amen on that…Sense of Community has been deteriorating for years which is why we need to be bringing it back with a vengeance to survive and thrive…Oh and if you brought a welding supply store into my town and I knew you and what you stood for me and all the people I know would shop there…
I owned and operated a small retail store. People had no problem walking in and asking me if a product I sold was a better deal on some ebay auction or Amazon. I eventually gave in and started selling new and used stuff on ebay. When I couldn’t take the low-margin sub-minimum wage workload any longer, I quit.
Well if that’s you in your avatar pic and you gave them that look I too would be shopping online…
About six months ago I was in the local mall here in Vermont. Inside I saw an elderly Chinese couple trimming their fingernails into a garbage can in front of the Sears. There were very few other people around. They are tearing down the other Mall in Burlington. Malls will not be missed.
It seems like every big change wrought by a new iteration of capitalism has involved the breaking of some unwritten rule that everyone has unconsciously learned to respect and observe, and the capitalist either recognizes his opportunity out of consideration of the facts, or is simply morally unaware, or both. You mention the town retailer and Sears. Sears didn’t get started by selling stuff people couldn’t otherwise get. Folks could order anything Sears offered through their local retailer, but by ordering direct they bypassed the local middle man. Funny thing is, you could tell when Sears was beginning to struggle… Read more »
Old Chambers could turn a phrase, couldn’t he?
Witness is one of the best books you’ll ever read.
“A life with no other purpose than to work and consume is actually lower than beastly”
Amen, brother. Consumption often leads to debt slavery, which is one of it’s purposes.
And that MS (((Rand))) childless, spent her last days dependent on social security, is the irony.
You know what’s even more ironic is those that want to be just like her and insist that you should as well…What’s up with people who want to follow in the footsteps of loser’s…Sad That…
A profound essay ZMan
Your last line reminds me of the Neil Postman book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. I highly recommend it.
“The point of life is for old men to plant trees in whose shade they will never stand.” Wow. How simultaneously poignant and beautiful.
I would suggest that the angst that leads to high suicide rates is grounded in a personal sense of worthlessness. This desperation is often wrought by the absence of existential challenges in one’s life experience and the corresponding lack of opportunities to overcome obstacles and prove one’s mettle. If you’re never tested, you will never know pride of accomplishment. And no one starts out wanting to become an addict or a parasite.
There is a predilection towards suicide for certain people. It is how they are wired. Just as money can make the misery or joy more comfortable, so can fame and fortune make the depressive personality more comfortable. But it doesn’t change how the person is wired, underneath it all. Agreed, the drivers are often a sense of worthlessness, but that can well up inside a person, no matter what he has done. There are a lot of Anthony Bourdain fans (like me) who deeply appreciated what he said and did in his books and broadcasts, and can say he brought… Read more »
Worthlessness? Or self loathing. How many of the suicides also have tattoos, body piercings?
It’s all part of the package. One thing that turns up again and again is the inability to consistently regulate one’s outward behavior patterns over time. “Why did you do that?” “I don’t know”. The whole “falling off the wagon” thing. Perhaps the internal thinking and sense of self-worth and self-loathing (two sides of the same coin) are just as inconsistently internally applied or responded to, which results in occasional bouts of extreme behaviors.
Errmmmm….that ‘worthlessness’ (if that be the cause of suicides) is due to atheism, whether real or ‘practical.’ IOW, one’s worth is infinite to the God who created one, and knowing that makes all the difference.
Once again, somewhat off kilter. To take one of his points, suicide rates. The study did not, and probably could not, control for willingness to accurately report suicides. Previously, suicide was often reported as an accidental death, for many reasons: religious, life insurance, social reputation, etc.
I bought a ceiling fan at Home Depot once. I didn’t look closely at the box, and when I arrived home I had this sinking feeling as I opened a box that had clearly been opened at least once before. Broken hardware. Missing parts. So, back to Home Depot I went to turn it back in. Since I wanted to see what would happen, I didn’t otherwise mark up the box. A few days later, it was taped back up and placed back on the shelf. Now when I return things, I write on the box with a Sharpie, “Missing… Read more »
The elites relate to the rest of us strictly transactionally. The virus is spreading.
The commercial tenants pay the high rents because the underlying property is valuable. Because the property is valuable, there is usually a lot of borrowing (financing) involved in the ownership of the property. So the money flows uphill from the customer to the business owner to the landlord to the bank (or other financing institution). Only the ultimate lender gets much return, in the short run. The traditional way of breaking the cycle was for the business owner to own the property under the store. Price Club, the predecessor and model for CostCo, strictly adhered to the “own the land… Read more »
Yeah, I know how it works. I almost bought this building 5 years ago. Decided to buy some property up in the mountains for my family’s personal use instead. His mortgage is about $5500/mo and the rents deliver about $12000/mo. It’s not a huge facility. He has $$ room to keep businesses open and bays full. I put my foot down on CAM a couple of years ago and told him to stick it where the sun don’t shine (he had raised it 30% in less than 3 years) which stopped the bleeding. Threatened an audit, and that put an… Read more »
How hard would it be for you to move? I mean when does the cost of staying outweigh relocating where you don’t have that…
For me, my lease is nearly up, so I am outta here. I can move 7-8 miles south outside of town limits, in a different city/tax base, and reduce my costs 25%. More available retail space, lower triple-net, better property management.
Still in CO though which is turning bluer by the minute…Come on up to MT;)
That’s a fair enough analysis of corporatization and financialization. It’s a bit of a misunderstanding of Sears (and its competitors such as Montgomery Ward and Spiegel) because it picks up the story very late in the day. Those enterprises began in the nineteenth century as mail-order retailers serving the settlers opening up the American West. The big mail-order houses were the only way that folks on the farms and in the small towns of the Midwest and the West could obtain most manufactured goods. No mom-and-pop store had the capital to fulfill the needs of a widely scattered population. Sears,… Read more »
Your post reminds me of being a boy when the Sears catalog had a few pages of bra advertisements. At the time, this was the only place for young boys to see women in bras. Exhilerating!
Oh yes!
“The heroin addict is always faced with the choice. Give up the junk and became whole again or take the easy way out.”
And now we have an actual junkie suicide in Anthony Bourdain.
The addictive personality and the depressive personality seem to have many similar things going on. Think of it as the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other, and the addictive brain or depressive brain chooses to deal with the devil, who takes him over the edge. Most of the rest of us are content to work with the angel and ignore the devil. Walk or run away from what can hurt you and those around you. Not everyone can do that, and, IMO, many of those who deal with the devil do so with some understanding that… Read more »
Or the other option which will be the one we have to use eventually unless you plan on being enslaved or letting them put you in the ditch…We Are At War Remember…
Gerard, aren’t you going to record a tearful hysterical video rant and post it on Instagram over Bourdain? No?
Ideally Trump will be able push Turkey economically, and get them pointed at Iran for relief (i.e. by taking Iranian oil fields)
Ideally all neocons will croak before the next election, thus reducing this toxic influence of Trump to do Israel’s bidding.
Btw, Sears didn’t collapse for any reason other than they got rid of their catalog operations back in the late 80’s or early 90’s. They had a fantastic catalog operation back in pre-internet days. Shortly after they abandoned their catalog offerings, the internet exploded. If Sears had stuck with that service offering, they would have been one of the best positioned companies in America for the internet revolution.
I am not sure that follows. Plenty of stores (JC Penney) had strong catalog and that doesn’t offer any advantage to internet migration.
Exactly. Apparently the people running it no longer had the know-how.
Sears sort of tied themselves to the mall as the “way of the future”. What happened to the malls? For one thing, time. Malls are aging structures which can be refurbished inside, but rather difficult on the outside. Plus, you have to be able to afford to update your look. Mall rent has always been too high. You have to have a certain amount of traffic to maintain the income stream. Stores like Sears were immune to that in that they were a national chain with thousands of stores and could support non-performing stores with other stores that were profitable.… Read more »
“Traffic stayed the same or even increased, but serious buyers decreased.” This hadn’t occurred to me. But yes, I do see mass strolling compared to buying. Here in SoCal it’s what many Latino families do after church. And hordes of Chinese, who you’re constantly dodging because they walk like they drive. I can’t think of anything in life that I’ve gone from loving so much to hating so much, as malls. They were so peaceful and nice when I was a kid. They’re what nurtured my lifelong love of elevator music. I still remember the smell of the water fountains… Read more »
It helps knowing where someone hails from to understand their comments and where they are at in the awake spectrum… Thanks…
I hadn’t thought much lately about the malls when I was a teenager, but your experiences mirror mine almost exactly. Mine was the one in Carlsbad, CA, along El Camino Real. Drove by it last week, still there.
Not at all OT…
Austrian vs. Australian economics
http://www.unz.com/isteve/austrian-economics-vs-australian-economics/?highlight=Austrian+Australian
Tim
I don’t think you’ve lived in a lot of rural communities. it’s nice to think the local stores respond to local demand. Unfortunately, when they are the only business in town, sometimes they don’t.
Used to be a store out in the middle of nowhere, that sold 6 packs of pop for $5 back in the 80s. He had a sign that read: This is not Burger King. You get it my way or hit the highway.
Yep some people are like that where greed rules the day then when the competition comes to town whether by mail order(Amazon) or a new store they screech and moan about loyalty of customer and the need to shop local when they never gave a damn about their community in the first place…
Notso… You are implying not all local businessmen are altruistic? But that would destroy the narrative of the post, would it not?
Din C, there’s a difference between Z being flat out wrong, and Z making generalizations which have to be made in short posts that don’t bore the shit out of everyone with details and qualifications.
Now THAT’S what I call “Dissident Right”!
Amen!
I can see the Natick Mall from my little jail cell cubicle and if I want a good parking spot I go to the Sears side where the lot is always empty. The Wegmans they just opened to replace another old retailer JC Penney is booming.
Heh, heh, hey, man…wadda you in for? Heh, heh…
This post is poignant to me, very topical for the time. My hometown here is a small Illinois town of about 900-1000 people. Next week a grocery store in town that has been open since the early 1970s will close….. and a Dollar General will open next month. Part of me wants to rail against big business and big chains, but as Glenfithie said, we’re the root of the problem. I’d run to this store for milk or bread or the odd item, but me and everyone else in town would drive 20-30 minutes into the city to buy most… Read more »
I fell for Miss Rand’s polemic against the leftist looters. Doubts emerged after my high school days in the Mall were over. I did some years as a local “Fred’s Welding Supply” equivalent as well. When I was done with a long day, I’d catch Anthony Bourdain, on No Reservations, jetting around to the places I had no time or money to visit, and hinting at his existential angst and doubts about consumerism. He got the first important message of this column, Z, but never the second.
Solzhenitsyn: “If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one’s life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better… Read more »
The problem with Sears is that it has been poorly managed for decades. It started declining in the 1970’s, even before malls became popular, let alone the internet and Amazon. Other “big box” retailers such as Best Buy and Ross Dress for Less are doing just fine. You can order from them through the internet, then pick up at the nearest store to your home or work. Walmart offers the same service. Businesses that adapt to changing conditions usually do OK. Those that don’t usually disappear. A lot of this is due to poor management. E.g. why didn’t the railroads… Read more »