BIG BOX STORES
I’ve complained often here, comparing the permanence of European architecture and the careful use of European land to the ugly sprawl of flimsy American buildings that look as if one huff and a puff would blow them over, and sometimes does. My visit on Wednesday to the Best Buy store to buy a modem reminded me of this. It is a huge building with high ceilings with a lot of well lighted merchandise and a few sales people to guide you to the right thing. I had seen the Eero router, that I finally bought, on line at Amazon and had considered buying it there. I would not have to leave the house and would get it the next day. But I wanted advice to make sure I got a router that was right for Spectrum internet. The router that the salesperson led me to was the same Eero router made by an Amazon company being sold in the store of their competitor Best Buy, which seemed odd. Even more remarkable was the knowledge that if the Best Buy price had been higher than the Amazon price the salesperson in Best Buy would have sold it to me for the Amazon price. In fact he looked it up on his cell phone and showed me that the price was the same in both places.
If I had bought it on Amazon prime it would have come from some huge warehouse outside of Asheville and been delivered by an Amazon Prime truck. No wonder this Best Buy store gives the appearance of being temporary, as if it could disappear in a day. A change in marketing and it would disappear flash. There was some kind of odd symbiotic relationship between two competitors. Best Buy gives me a showroom for Amazon products that I can only see on line but Amazon can’t undercut Best Buy’s price because Best Buy will meet the price. Best Buy seems to be as virtual as Amazon is.
Spectrum (internet), which used to be in a big building in South Asheville, now closed, sold me my Internet connection over the phone through a young woman in Greenville, South Carolina, 60 miles away. Where the modem Spectrum sent me actually came from I don’t know, it arrived by way of Fed Ex. But the instructions on the box told me that if I wanted to discontinue service with Spectrum I shouldn’t return the modem to the Spectrum a store in South Asheville, now defunct. That building was only temporary for Spectrum. Instead of returning the modem to a physical Spectrum store I should take it to any UPS store and say I wanted to return it to Spectrum and UPS would return it free of charge. I have no idea where it would be returned to, no idea where Spectrum is.
And when I needed to activate my modem I needed my username and password and had no idea what it was. I called the Spectrum help number and got the syrupy voice modulated by artificial intelligence that asked the same questions over and over, accepting only certain answers and not helping me at all find my user name or password, which was why I called. Finally when I acted like a complete idiot, randomly entering fake numbers instead of the 1, 2 or 3 answers posed by AI, none of them remotely relevant to what I wanted to know, I was finally shunted to a person. Where he was I don’t know either. Spectrum is nowhere, Eero is in the Philippines, UPS and the Internet are my means of connecting with them. I do know that the Amazon warehouse, somewhere around Asheville, must be the biggest big box store of all run by artificial intelligence and robots and offering fewer and fewer low paying manual jobs.
So of course the mini malls along the highway are temporary. No one is going to spend any more than they have to on sales outlets. They are just flimsy boxes, here today, gone tomorrow, where people can purchase things like my Eero router made in Vietnam. The flimsier the buildings are the better as long as they are freshly painted and brightly lit and will last a few years. This is probably the most efficient way to provide people with merchandise within the American system. Amazon‘s competitor, Walmart, in its huge warehouselike, goods piled up still in boxes in big box stores are huge but just as flimsy. Walmart is half on line and half a temporary store as is Best Buy. All deliver free through UPS, Fed Ex or the post office.
In fact, now that I think about it, this half virtual, half flimsy type of store with few sales people is probably the cheapest and most efficient way to support American capitalist consumerism. It is banal and impersonal and more on line than off and ugly from the outside with the goods coming from jobs shipped abroad, but it is the most efficient way to increase the American standard of living (not the quality of life).
So why should I complain? Consumerism and banality and temporariness is the American way of life. American sprawl is the way things should be and soon will be everywhere, even in Europe if they don‘t watch out.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 