Word: marteli
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...increasingly homogenous and media-saturated country, one utterly devoid of places with real individuality. We drove through town after town, always seeing the same thing: a depressed downtown area dotted with closed shops and "For Sale" signs and an area on the outskirts of town where Wal-Mart, Taco Bell and other such stores existed in all their banal, sterilized splendor. There was a stretch in Minnesota and Wisconsin where there were definitely more Pizza Huts than grocery stores...
Consumers pay less for a frilly, carpet-covered toilet seat at a cavernous Wal-Mart or K-mart than they would pay for that same glorious throne at a local mom-and-pop store. And, thus, the consumer is better off. Who am I to stand in the way? By criticizing this trend, I am not trying to advance a socialist agenda, I am merely lamenting the disappearance of small-town America, the America suggested to me by Norman Rockwell paintings...
...what's the solution? We must be aware of the cost of both our new warehouse style of capitalism, as embodied by Wal-Mart and Costco, and the revolution in communications technology. Small-town America no longer exists the way it did when our parents were growing up. You can still find unique places, but they are becoming more and more rare...
...poignant monument to this sort of denial. Hard by bright blue signs marking Galveston's primary evacuation route, a small plaque commemorates the site where the hurricane of 1900 destroyed an orphanage and took the lives of 87 children. Just across the street stands a brand new Wal-Mart...
...become less lurid. Vivid is happy to peddle videotapes in a more Main Street manner through the Adam & Eve catalog, which is mailed to 2.5 million people a month, and Tower and Virgin record stores, where the "Vivid girls" have done signings. Castle Superstores, a chain of eight Wal-Mart-size outlets in the West, is trying to bring a sense of class to the business. By getting rid of peep shows and strippers, the Castle stores have been able to attract a clientele that is nearly 50% couples, much higher than the 20% most stores get. "People want...