Goodbye to mom and pop

From the Sacramento Bee today

This writer is talking about the demise of independent businesses and the loss to America.

Both of my sons and my daughter-in-law work for Barnes & Noble. It's a fine company and near the top of the "Buy Blue" list. I have a great time there. However, it's very different from our downtown second hand bookstore with its funky atmosphere and staff who love books - all books. In fairness to B&N, I can't see that they've made any attempt to swallow up this small store and there seems to be room enough for both here.

Many of our small businesses are disappearing however and the American landscape is changing.

We can drive across the country on the freeways and never notice a thing. The goal seems to be to move from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Worried about strange food? McDonalds will take care of that for you. Need to sleep? How about Motel 6 who always leaves the light on for you. Niagara Falls, Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon? Who needs to waste time on scenery when the kids have a dvd player built in.

I used to drive from San Francisco north to Ukiah, Eureka, or sometimes Crescent City on CA 101 every other month. We often left the main highway and drove through the redwoods just for the beauty. We had favorite stopping places along the way. None were chains. All were unique. We used to look for one new (to us) place on each trip. I wonder if any have survived.

The article isn't a rant against "progress" exactly; more of a regretful look at times past.

We probably can't unring this bell.

Note: I included a link before I remembered that the Sacto Bee requires registration to read their articles. Free, but you may not want to bother. Here's the article:


Leonard Pitts Jr.: Bye, Mom and Pop
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
Published 2:15 am PST Monday, January 30, 2006
I don't expect you to shed any tears because Aron's is gone.
Unless you grew up in L.A., as I did, you've probably never even heard of it. Aron's was this used record and CD store that I discovered 30 years ago. It was an audiophile heaven where there was never any telling what offbeat treasure you might find.


More to the point, it was "my" place, a store where I spent endless hours browsing for rarities and oddities you could never find elsewhere. To this day, no trip back to the city of L.A. is complete without an afternoon at Aron's. Or at least, that used to be the case. Recently, I read online in the L.A. Times that Aron's will soon be closing its doors.
The paper played it as a sign of hard times in the music industry, noting that the number of independent music stores has dropped by half in the last 10 years. But for my money, the demise of Aron's is symptomatic of something larger: Mom and Pop are dying. Or at least, starting to smell funny.

You remember Mom and Pop, right? Mr. and Mrs. Small Business? Used to own that diner down the street, that coffee shop around the corner, that record store across town? Used to run that bookstore with the long aisles of dusty paperbacks where you could while away a rainy afternoon browsing to your heart's content. They gave the neighborhood personality. They gave it soul.

Then somebody bought them out, knocked down the building and put up a Wal-Mart. Or a Starbucks. Or a box store with low prices, huge selection and all the soul of tuna on white bread. And one by one those storied places, yours and mine, winked out of existence.

At this point, the Commerce Department would want me to remind you that the vast majority of businesses in this country are still small ones. Which is true, but also misleading. In 2002, the last year for which numbers are available, the Census Bureau reported that music stores racked up $7.2 billion in sales. Of that, just under $5 billion, roughly 70 percent, was generated by only seven chains, each employing 1,000 people or more. In 1992, by contrast, big music stores accounted for "only" 60 percent of the market.

Similarly, general interest bookstores reported sales of almost $9.5 billion in 2002, roughly 80 percent of which was generated by four large chains. In 1992, the mega chains accounted for less than half the bookstore market.

The big are eating the small. Indeed, ask Bob Perry of Blue Note Records in North Miami Beach what business is like for independent music sellers like him, and the first word out of his mouth is, "Sucks." "It's very, very bad," he adds. Perry says his store thrives only because he's diversified: He sells posters, memorabilia and does Internet auctions.

This is not the business page, I know. But this lament is not for lost business. Rather, it's for a loss of -- here's that word again -- soul. Meaning the things that once made our communities unique.

Drive across the country these days and "unique" is not a word that comes often to mind. Increasingly, Richmond could be Rochester could be Dayton could be Duluth. We shop at cookie-cutter stores in cookie-cutter malls and eat at cookie-cutter restaurants, not because the food is special but because it is familiar.

A former colleague called it the Wal-Martification of America. It's as good a term as any for the process by which we become uniform. And regionalisms -- that thing they say only in Cincy, that funky bookstore in lower Manhattan, that dish you can get only in that little dive in Jackson -- become fewer and further between.

Progress is inexorable, so I suppose there's nothing to do but wave Mom and Pop goodbye and mourn what they represent: a world before Velcro and digital clocks where families watched TV together and neighbors knew one another by name.

Not to sentimentalize. Time passes, yes. Things change.

But man, Aron's was my place. And I'm sorry, but amazon.com just ain't the same.


About the writer:
Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132; e-mail, lpitts@herald.com; toll-free phone, (888) 251-4407. His column routinely appears in The Bee Friday and occasionally on other days. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.