Did American Towns Lose Their Individuality?

no, the closest my mom lived to cranford would have been colonia or linden......had to look up which was closer....god damn i had no idea linden was next to cranford, i only see signs for it when i ride on 18.

i am certain we passed each other at some point but that happens with lots of people that you never get to know i am guessing.

reminds me of a trip i made to seattle. i mentioned it on a social site that i was going to seattle and someone said you have to visit kells pub i think it was. being irish descent and loving irish beer and some of the food i put it on my to do list.
plane ride sucked though i was in front of a young kid who kicked my seat the whole flight. i didnt say anything...i was young and energetic once after all.
I just shook my Guinness hat and made the best of it. we got to the part where you have to shut off all electronics and i started to get a bit more restless. and so did the kid kicking my seat behind me. i turned around and gave a look but didnt say a word. complaining would do no good at this point being we were pulling into the terminal at that point.
second day of the trip and i went to the bar that the guy recommended. the guy bartending was pretty cool. we liked the same music and i found out he had a fake irish accent. i am guessing it helps with the environment or atmosphere.
a woman comes out of the back and walks up to me and says. did you fly here from newark? im like. damn do i have a stalker.
i said yeah.
she says oh my son was kicking your chair. i noticed you because of that Guinness hat. your next drink is on me.
bartender gets me my free beer and tells me she is the owner of the place.

 

He pretends to have an Irish accent???????

 

he said he picked it up. but he never lived in ireland.

 

the owner had a real irish accent though. not sure about her but her parents were there and they were right off the boat.

 

Ah okay.

My U.K. Accents are absolutely horrible.

 

Starbucks built one of the first starbucks here immediately next to a little drive thru coffee shop that had been a staple in my town for a long time. Like, they were maybe 50 feet away from each other and shared a parking lot

I thought it was such a dick move.

The local coffee place went out of business within a year

I hate starbucks, their coffee is so bleh

 

I wasn't very impressed with star bucks either and I didn't particularly find in to be convenient either as we were always waiting because it was so popular.

I don't understand how coffee takes so long to make anyway but a proper coffee shops seem to dick around for 10-15mins sometimes. Even the stores around here. Sometimes it's better to order, pay and go shopping and come back for it.

I thought Starbucks would be really fast and decent. He only time I enjoyed it was a white chocolate mocha in Denver, but I was so hungover so it had to taste good.

 

I dont really like the fancy frappamochachocolata coffees

I went into a coffee shop a couple of weeks ago that only had like 4 items on the menu. I thought I was in heaven, not a single frappucino in sight. Best coffee i've ever had too, now i want one damnit.

 

i get kind of frustrated where i live because of the lack of chain stores. we have a walmart, and the most prevalent fast food places, but that's pretty much it. not that i have an issue with shopping locally, but the local shops don't have a great selection either so realistically if i need anything i have to drive 40 minutes to the next big town that is more like what is described in the OP.

i've lived in 5 different towns/cities in my adult life, and i think one of them had starbucks in it.

this part still describes pretty much every area i'm familiar with, outside the actual city of course.

 

I agree many towns of a certain size have become Homogeneous.

Once you exclude poor, rural, urban, and exclusive communities, every city is pretty much has the same a McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, a Mall with anchor stores like Walmart, Macy’s, J. C. Penny, Sears, T. J. Maxx, Nordstrom, and a major supermarket chain like Stop and Shop or Star Market….



Hotwater

 

the corporatizing and franchisization of retail, were primarily responsibe,
that and the automobile becomming the god of transportation policy.

the process began during the 1950s, but didn't really start to become obvious until well into the 1980s.

of course such a process is never uniform,
and a few places probably could still be found,
if one looked really hard, and mostly a long way from the interstate.

the mom and pop hippie botique retailing of the 70s
was kind of a last hold out against this trend.

other parts of the world, might be a partially or even mostly different picture.
i can only guess, having never lived in any of them,
and my only venture beyond u.s. borders was a brief visit to canada in the late 70s.

(ghawd, if its still anything like it was then, what i wouldn't give to be living there right now)
(still wish they had a lot more trains though. wish everyplace did)

(only two places in the world called earth that do, are switzerland and japan)

 

And dispensaries everywhere

 

Great thought, OP.

I think they have, somewhat. I think part of that loss of individuality came with the wide accessibility of the internet. Presently, most everyone with at least a modest income, no matter how isolated, has access to mainstream life and popular ideas through the web. While I think this is largely beneficial, it also came at a price which was paid with a certain amount of homogeneity. So you have a population of people with reasonable exposure to a lot of different ideas, whereas before you had to really seek out those ideas (and you had no one with which to discuss them) at a library or perhaps in university, if you were so lucky.

I dunno, it's something to think about. I've lived in and visited some enclaves that are still largely unique and remote: so they do still exist, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time before such places vanish completely.

 

started long before the internet. even before there were pong games. has more to do with cultural inclinations then technologies.
technology mostly follows where culture leads because its culture that inspires and drives the development of it.
grated technologies paths of least resistence to development, often then diverge from the cultural motivations that inspire them.

no, it was the automobile, and the greed that motivated the corporatizing and monetizing of everything,
that lead to the gray-washing and monotanizing.
the myth of normality helped to shape those motivating cultural values too.

 

A comedy sketch should be done on this. Take a quaint town like Andy Griffith's Mayberry and have the corporate giants move in to 'drain the swamp' and replace all the mom-and-pop shops with Walmart, Starbucks, and Home Depot. Floyd the Barber would lose his business and work for Best Cuts. Goober's service shop would succumb to Jiffy Lube. Sarah the telephone operator would be replaced with an outsourced voice from India. Otis would end up in a privatized prison. Aunt Bee would be replaced with an undocumented worker from a transnational agency. The Bluebird Diner would be replaced with McDonald's.

 

I know all about the lost small town charm. The town where I grew up put in an outlet mall. That's where a lot of major brands like Calvin Klein and DKNY and Ralph Lauren and Tommy Hilfiger Puma, Skechers, Adidas.. all open up shop. It's phenomenal for the local economy, but the town isn't the same. Everyone moved there from LA and it's like no one is from there anymore. You go to Starbucks or the outlet or whatever and no one is even a native. They all are visiting from out of town or have moved there from somewhere else. I don't live there anymore, and nowadays it doesn't bother me anymore. But when I first started noticing that nothing was sacred... it really was noticeable. I think I was too young for it to really have bothered me. We adapt so easily at younger ages. I must have been 15 or 16 when they put that place in.

I see there are lots of people who don't like Starbucks. I don't mind it and I've found that they have so many different flavors (not frappucino, I don't buy those). I mean regular coffee. There must be like 5 different countries on there little Starbucks Reserve board, though I'd rather pay $2 for the Pike Roast or whatever bold dark coffee they have that day than pay $3 or $4 for the specialty coffee (which sometimes isn't as good!). Anyway...

There used to be a mom and pop quality that I barely remember growing up in that town. Now it's gone.

 

its not even just 'charm'. its more each place being the consensus of people who actually live there, instead of every place being the consensus of everyone everywhere.

even malls wouldn't have to be a bad thing if mom and pop retailers could afford spaces in them, and they were the public commons, and they were surrounded by gardens and served by public transit,
instead of acres and acres of parking lots.

better yet, instead of building a whole new mall, would be to put a roof over the main old shopping street and remove auto traffic from it, essentially making a mall like space, while keeping existing commercial districts viable.

there are just so many better things that could be done, then letting corporate greed get away with destroying everything (and calling doing so "conservative"? seriously?)

the automobile was already destroying 'mayberry' anyway. which was a pretty strange concept for a place given the location street scenes looked like a town of at least ten thousand,
who's entire law enforcement consisted of one gentle down home super cop and one slightly retarded deputy. a combination that worked fine in the much smaller town of less then a thousand i grew up in.
(and would have been thoroughly wtf in the town that resembled mayberry's street scenes i graduated high school from)

when the railroad stopped running passenger service until amtrak stepped in and started running one train a day, when a decade earlier there had been four each way, and the greyhound stopped coming into town and only stopped at the freeway off ramp instead, that forced everyone to have to have cars or move away to cities.

and people loved their cars, and they were magical, unless they stopped to think how much of their lives were not enslaved to working extra hours to pay for maintaining them, or spending those extra hours doing so themselves.

and the first big box stores were wonderful too. little big box stores, more or less still owned by people living in the same state or county, where everything was so much cheaper then it even cost the little guys to maintain inventory. then the bigger fish were swallowed up by even bigger fish, and the old crowd that hung out at lil's bakery now went to the a&w, jack in the box, dairy queen, and eventually mcdogshits and burger peasant.

because they were faster and no one had long enough lunch breaks any more for old lil and fritz the baker to keep up with.

 

better yet, instead of building a whole new mall, would be to put a roof over the main old shopping street and remove auto traffic from it, essentially making a mall like space, while keeping existing commercial districts viable.

i was going to quote him on this subject too, because i know towns that try to do things such as this, maybe not exactly the same but the same idea.

i was in the town of new bern NC and i didnt drive around much but it definitely had a feel that was exclusive to them. maybe the chain stores were on the other part of town or maybe they were one of the exceptions to the rule.

 

This was done in my town, an old mayor hired a landscape architect to redesign the town to resemble his home town of Vienna with plenty of walkable space. This was actually done before 3 malls were built in the suburbs and the city did see a decline in the 70s and 80s but because of its design it was able to bounce back fairly easily