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Is there any truly "local" retail left?
Sep. 24th, 2006 05:01 pmI was just ruminating on the disappearance of many local and regional retailers and companies with decades of service and tradition behind them in the wake of corporate consolidation. Frex, here in the Atlanta area the Rich's chain of department stores was eaten a couple years ago by Federated Stores, which replaced them with co-branded Rich's-Macy's stores and then finally with just the Macy's brand. Where I used to live some years back in the Washington, DC area, People's Drug got subsumed by the CVS behemoth and Woodward & Lothrop, a local department store chain, and Hechinger's, a hardware outfit, simply got driven out of business entirely by Hecht's and The Home Depot, respectively. And in my home city of New Orleans, Rite Aid earned my undying enmity by buying out and obliterating the fine old K&B Drug Stores chain after having promised to retain the name in some fashion. This after Dillard's department stores ate both D. H. Holmes and Maison Blanche in that same region.
Then, of course, there's the whole banking and telecoms industries, which are seeing fish get swallowed by bigger and bigger fish repeatedly. In DC, Sovran Bank got eaten by NationsBank, which in turn got eaten by Bank of America; and here in Atlanta BellSouth, one of the last remnants of the old Bell System, is about to get eaten by the new Frankenstein's monster created from the merger of SBC and AT&T's long-distance business. Also here, SouthTrust Bank had just barely completed their big new HQ building when they got eaten by Wachovia and had to buy a big new sign to replace the first big new one they'd just put up. Even in the city of my birth, Lafayette, LA, most of the old local banks' names are gone, replaced by out-of-town super-regional banks such as Hibernia and BankOne.
So I was wondering: do y'all have any favorite local stores or businesses that died off or were killed in this fashion that you miss? How much of your area's unique regional character remains...and how much has been destroyed by the metastasization of corporate gigantism?
Then, of course, there's the whole banking and telecoms industries, which are seeing fish get swallowed by bigger and bigger fish repeatedly. In DC, Sovran Bank got eaten by NationsBank, which in turn got eaten by Bank of America; and here in Atlanta BellSouth, one of the last remnants of the old Bell System, is about to get eaten by the new Frankenstein's monster created from the merger of SBC and AT&T's long-distance business. Also here, SouthTrust Bank had just barely completed their big new HQ building when they got eaten by Wachovia and had to buy a big new sign to replace the first big new one they'd just put up. Even in the city of my birth, Lafayette, LA, most of the old local banks' names are gone, replaced by out-of-town super-regional banks such as Hibernia and BankOne.
So I was wondering: do y'all have any favorite local stores or businesses that died off or were killed in this fashion that you miss? How much of your area's unique regional character remains...and how much has been destroyed by the metastasization of corporate gigantism?
