The January 4, 2025, edition of The Santa Cruz Sentinel, my hometown newspaper, ran an article on Page 4 that announced the close of the O'Neill Surf Shop on Pacific Avenue. Pacific Avenue is the city's main downtown shopping street. The article explained the shop's shutdown as an effort to "consolidate operations in an evolving retail landscape."
In case others have not noticed this "evolving retail landscape," it is largely characterized by an increasing number of closed-down storefronts throughout our community. These, I believe, reflect one thing, more than anything else. We are not in a time of general economic "downturn." Almost the opposite - at least that is what a number of economists seem to be saying. We are, however, in a time in which we seem to be abandoning "real world" retail for "online" retail at a prodigious pace. I keep seeing those delivery trucks in every street, at every hour of the day and night.
As in many other aspects of our life, we seem to have been persuaded that our lives are better lived when lived "online."
I don't think that's true. How about you?
If you don't think that's true, either, then start considering how you can detach yourself from your phone, stop ordering your dinners from Doordash, and figure out how to obtain the books, and the hardware, and the household items you need from somewhere other than the Amazon store. That would be a beginning, anyway. The more we patronize and purchase from "the internet," the more "real world" storefronts close.
Are we ready, once again, to go back to living in that physical, "real world"? Truly, I hope so!
Foundation of Freedom
Right on, Gary. Not only do Jean and I refuse to order things online, we don't have cell phones, never have, never will. No need. We walk to local stores and keep our money in our community, working for the greater good. No brag, just fact.
ReplyDeleteNote that it is the city "planners" that are turning us into community-less consumers. The businesses that we could walk to have mainly disappeared, replaced by buildings that will probably never be able to fill their first floor retail spaces. Every place that I used every week. without a car, are gone e.g. Salvation Army, Tom's University Copy, India Joze, New Leaf, etc.. The Metro has removed many of their stops so it doesn't serve elderly or disabled. The new buildings have little to no parking for cars and the inmates will be on line. $4K rentals will be filled with 5 students or the multi-homed wealthy. The city could probably buy 100 human peddled carts and pay 100 peeps a living wage for the money they wasted on running a " trolley to nowhere" all summer. The trolleys had screens over the windows but as they passed one could easily see that they were almost always empty. These trolleys didn't even go to the Boardwalk, as they originally did, or the end of the wharf, but stopped on Front St.
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