This Old Store: Rural groceries were once centers of small-town life, Door County Pulse, Patty Williamson, April 3, 2020

This article is about Door County, Wisconsin, but it applies to any part of small-town America where downtown businesses have been diminished or bankrupted.

They once dotted the countryside and villages of northern Door County: the little grocery stores that met so many needs. In the days when many families had no automobile — or women did not drive — homemakers depended on a store being within walking distance. They needed a shop where they could send a child for an item that was needed immediately, such as an ingredient for a cake that was already in process or extra pork chops when unexpected company arrived.

These were places that by today’s standards would hardly appear urbanized, yet they had many features that made them human-scaled, despite their less intense level of development. Rural villages functioned as tiny cities. More:

Many little grocery stores also carried a multitude of nonfood items such as clothing, shoes, housewares, lanterns, chicken feed and — if they were near a harbor or campground — the many supplies that boaters and campers needed. 

The stores served as community centers as well: repositories of news and places to find camaraderie. Most were heated by pot-belly stoves, which made them a convenient place for men to gather — usually with a spittoon nearby. For many farmers’ wives, the “butter and egg money” they earned each week was their only personal income, and it provided their chance to visit with other women while their orders were being filled. It may have been their only nonfamily social contact in weeks.

Williamson goes on to note that most such stores have closed within the last couple of decades or earlier, and only a small handful survive to this day. Business at this scale has been greatly diminished. Read the whole thing. And check out my recent piece tracing the history of small-town supermarkets in my hometown.

Retail’s ‘Dark Side’: As Inventory Piles Up, Liquidation Warehouses Are Busy, New York Times, Michael Corkery, July 30, 2022

The warehouse offers a window into a reckoning across the retail industry and the broader economy: After a two-year binge of consumer spending — fueled by government checks and the ease of e-commerce — a nasty hangover is taking hold.

The wastefulness here is just disgusting. But of course, for consumers who want a deal and actually want to keep the stuff they buy, it’s an opportunity.

This is also really interesting:

Many companies cannot afford to let discounted items ‌linger on their shelves because they have to make room for new seasonal goods and the necessities that consumers now prefer. While some retailers are discounting the surplus within their stores, many would rather avoid holding big sales themselves for fear of hurting their brands by conditioning buyers to expect big price cuts as the norm. So retailers look to liquidators to do that dirty work.

When I was a kid, I remember seeing all kinds of deep discounts and liquidations in physical stores. It seems like that’s less common now, partly due to the internet and partly due to this huge liquidation industry that has arisen as a side effect of e-commerce and free 90-day returns.

I like getting a deal, but I find this all kind of dispiriting. It reminds me of something a colleague said back at an internship with a small environmental org: the problem of consumerism is not that we care too much about our stuff, but that we care too little for it.

5 Central Jersey restaurants that we still miss, My Central Jersey, Cheryl Makin and Mike Deak, March 28, 2018

This is a trip down memory lane if you grew up in central New Jersey, but if you didn’t, it’s still a fun read. These are the kinds of quirky, colorful places that could give even New Jersey sprawl a sense of character and place. This one is my favorite:

What made The Leaning Tower of Pizza stand out in the splendid clutter of Route 22 was its own leaning tower. It was about as close as anyone in Central Jersey would get to the medieval marvel in Pisa, Italy. Contemporary zoning regulations would never allow a 30-foot leaning tower to be built in front of a restaurant on Route 22, but it was an unforgettable wonder of roadside art, along with the Flagship in Route 22’s center island in Union.

Check them all out!

The last item today is not an article but a Reddit thread in the sushi subreddit titled “I feel like 3 pod edamame is a lot rarer than it used to be.” There are vulgar, shaggy dog, and serious responses, but it’s interesting, because there probably is some actual commercial explanation for this. It’s interesting to me, anyway.

Related Reading:

New and Old #62

New and Old #63

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