If you really want to do a flex with it, swap out the SuperDrive with a hard drive caddy and make that setup a dual-SSD beast. I did this with my 2011 MBP in 2011, and am still using the same setup to this day. One SSD has Mojave; the other, which is larger, has Snow Leopard and spare storage/scratch disk area.
The caddy kit I bought came with a complimentary, external USB 2.0 enclosure for the OEM SuperDrive, for those instances when I needed to burn or read a disc. I’ve probably used that external enclosure about ten or a dozen times in all the years since. In retrospect, this has been a much better use of the limited space within.
Also, since this is the 17-inch, there might be a couple of ExpressCard add-ons worth exploring.
The job is limited to what I outlined. Unless they donate it to me, which is a possibility that does exist, but only just!
It won't get much use, whatever happens. TBH, I'm not really sure why they want it done. The data on it could easily be transferred to my sister's 2020 MBA, and then... I could have it!
The company I work for now has been Mac-centric since the beginning. In the warehouse there are all the castofffs. PowerMac G5s, G4s, Cinema Displays (acrylic) WITH the adapters, old Mac Minis (probably Intel) and other Mac bits and pieces.
I asked about the 20" CD and adapter I saw just sitting on a shelf once, but never heard back. But between my bosses and the Production Manager they know what they have. Trying to steer them to giving me something would just blow up in my face, LOL!
They'd be looking at me, like 'Yeah, that's ours. You can't have it."
OTOH, when I asked them about what to do with the old work issued 15" MBP they were like…"Why are you asking, just…whatever. 🤷♂️ ". They don't care basically.
Not that I'm going to run out and turn it in to my own Mac though. Still sitting on High Sierra.
This week, I became a beta tester for a programmer who is working on a remake of a classic 80s British computer game. Being able to gauge the beta version on a selection of Intel Macs with differing specifications and OS releases is a big help to them. So I've been working through noting how it performs on i5 and i7 MBPs down to a C2D MBA.
Ordinarily I'd share some images but the project is pretty secretive at the moment. When that changes, I shall reveal the details.
Of course, VLC is the default choice for media files and I'm running High Sierra.
If you're a fan of documentaries, you'll enjoy this one. It's funny, sad, engrossing, enlightening and thought provoking with a large number of participants from Hollywood and former senior figures at Blockbuster.
TLDR:
As an aside, we also had the Blockbuster chain in the UK and I remember when the first store opened here in the late 80s. During the latter seasons of Star Trek: Voyager and Deep Space Nine, I'd use them to rent new episodes because I didn't have subscription TV but eventually I found a cheaper - and better Indy store for that.
Right into the final years, I'd visit my local Blockbusters to buy new and used DVDs. Nowadays I have to obtain Blu-rays/DVDs from Amazon or eBay and some stuff was never available from UK retail stores anyway - like Criterion's titles.
Funny how people looking back see the end of Blockbuster as something sad...I'm just the opposite...I was glad to see them go out of business. Back when I was a kid in the town I lived there were a bunch of really great "Mom and Pop" video stores that each had a lot of personality and were a big part of my childhood. I recall many fond memories of my family renting a VCR (remember how expensive they used to be!!) and picking out a couple of movies to watch together on the weekend. It was great as we all looked around the store and decided together which two movies we all agreed would be the ones we took home. Good times indeed! Anyways, I recall the fateful year when Blockbuster Video came to town and with a couple of years they drove all of the small Mom and Pops out of business. After that the only game in town was generic boring high priced Blockbuster video, gone were all of the unique fun places. It's like having a couple of great atmospheric coffee shops that you love going to and then Starbucks comes to town and they all go under. Anyways, I always hated Blockbuster video for doing that and was super happy to see them go out of business.
Ain't payback a bitch!
On another note, What did I do with an early Intel today? I successfully transferred the motherboard and battery from a beat up 2015 13" MacBook air that I rescued from a recycle bin into the shell of a pristine 2014 13" MacBook air that I had and updated it to the latest version of Monterey. I now have a perfect condition 2015 "top of the line" i7 MacBook air with Apple factory installed 500 GB SSD and 8GB Ram in it!
Seeing as you quoted me, I'll point out that there were several other posts - including ones written by me that addressed the positives and the numerous negatives that were associated with Blockbuster.
As was mentioned earlier, Harding's store is effectively an Indy family run business that provides a service to the local community. I wouldn't want to see her go under.
It's certainly not payback for the people who lost their jobs at Blockbuster and their families. I can't take schadenfreude from that. Being unemployed is no joke (as I know only too well from my grim chapter), especially in a country like the U.S. that has minimal social security support. I hope that Harding continues to stay afloat.
Also, the demise of Blockbuster - regardless of whether you liked or loathed them - along with the disappearance of the video hire industry has had repercussions for physical media, which is discussed in the documentary.
On another note, What did I do with an early Intel today? I successfully transferred the motherboard and battery from a beat up 2015 13" MacBook air that I rescued from a recycle bin into the shell of a pristine 2014 13" MacBook air that I had and updated it to the latest version of Monterey. I now have a perfect condition 2015 "top of the line" i7 MacBook air with Apple factory installed 500 GB SSD and 8GB Ram in it!
The company I work for now has been Mac-centric since the beginning. In the warehouse there are all the castofffs. PowerMac G5s, G4s, Cinema Displays (acrylic) WITH the adapters, old Mac Minis (probably Intel) and other Mac bits and pieces.
I asked about the 20" CD and adapter I saw just sitting on a shelf once, but never heard back. But between my bosses and the Production Manager they know what they have. Trying to steer them to giving me something would just blow up in my face, LOL!
They'd be looking at me, like 'Yeah, that's ours. You can't have it."
OTOH, when I asked them about what to do with the old work issued 15" MBP they were like…"Why are you asking, just…whatever. 🤷♂️ ". They don't care basically.
Not that I'm going to run out and turn it in to my own Mac though. Still sitting on High Sierra.
This parody was created on my 2011 MBP w/ High Sierra using the GIMP and screengrabs taken using VLC from the ROTJ DVD - so this is what I've done with an early Intel Mac today.
This parody was created on my 2011 MBP w/ High Sierra using the GIMP and screengrabs taken using VLC from the ROTJ DVD - so this is what I've done with an early Intel Mac today.
I'll take a photo when I have a chance. Also, I was smart enough to swap the bottom cover with the motherboard to the older Mac so the serial # matches what's in the machine properly!
This parody was created on my 2011 MBP w/ High Sierra using the GIMP and screengrabs taken using VLC from the ROTJ DVD - so this is what I've done with an early Intel Mac today.
Actually, that wasn't my only significant activity on an early Intel Mac today.
I had also had a video chat session on Microsoft Teams using my 11" 2010 C2D MBA w/Catalina.
Upon every fresh start, a warning appears alerting me that I'm "on an old version of Teams" and that I should "update the app to continue using Teams on this device." Except that I can't update it because Microsoft no longer supports Catalina on newer versions of Teams.
No matter, you merely need to click X and close the notification and Teams will run anyway.
Picked up two 16GB SanDisk Cruiser USB sticks last week on eBay. They came in today. I went with this brand because I have an older stick of the same make.
The older one has a white slide out and flashes orange when accessing data. The new sticks have a red slide out and do not flash. But that's not the only interesting thing I discovered.
Exact same model and brand, but the newer models (with the red slider) have 16.1GB storage while my older one has 16.33GB storage.
Guess what OCLP was telling me when trying to use the new stick to create an installer? Yeah…insufficient space! So this is a case of where the older style had/has slightly more space (about 200MB more). Go figure!
Attempted to open an old QuarkXPress file (version 6) with InDesign CC 2024 on my 2009 Mac Pro. Unfortunately, Adobe is still stuck at version 4.0 for converting QXP files. That's due to licensing, but I was hoping that by 2024 things might have gotten better.
No.
So, off the QXP 8.0 on the 2015 MBP. This version has Markztools installed so, just a matter of opening the file and then exporting as version 4.0. Once I got that, then ID was able to convert the file. I could have done it on the SL Mini or my 17" PowerBook, but it was just faster this way.
I had a PDF, I could have just imported that and converted it inside ID, but I didn't want everything breaking up.
Attempted to open an old QuarkXPress file (version 6) with InDesign CC 2024 on my 2009 Mac Pro. Unfortunately, Adobe is still stuck at version 4.0 for converting QXP files. That's due to licensing, but I was hoping that by 2024 things might have gotten better.
No.
So, off the QXP 8.0 on the 2015 MBP. This version has Markztools installed so, just a matter of opening the file and then exporting as version 4.0. Once I got that, then ID was able to convert the file. I could have done it on the SL Mini or my 17" PowerBook, but it was just faster this way.
I had a PDF, I could have just imported that and converted it inside ID, but I didn't want everything breaking up.
Conversion of Quark files is always a tetchy thing, even between major versions, to say nothing of conversion between it and InDesign.
Often enough, 99 per cent of everything is intact and in place, as it was last opened in the original version of the application. Still, there’s often something which ends up being off: a text box being a hair smaller and showing the red-x square of annoyance; a linked set of images it can’t find (mostly a problem when I’ve had to open really old 4.x files from the early ’00s); or a document’s call-out for fonts has just enough variation from when it was last opened (on another machine) to demand a close inspection, if re-linking to fonts one has active at that moment.
Conversion of Quark files is always a tetchy thing, even between major versions, to say nothing of conversion between it and InDesign.
Often enough, 99 per cent of everything is intact and in place, as it was last opened in the original version of the application. Still, there’s often something which ends up being off: a text box being a hair smaller and showing the red-x square of annoyance; a linked set of images it can’t find (mostly a problem when I’ve had to open really old 4.x files from the early ’00s); or a document’s call-out for fonts has just enough variation from when it was last opened (on another machine) to demand a close inspection, if re-linking to fonts one has active at that moment.
I have various files (not just QXP) back to 1992-1993, a couple PageWrecker files back to about 1990 and various Microsoft Works docs as well. I have attempted to update these files over the years, mostly when I had access to work apps. Eventually I was able to just use my own apps.
This particular doc would have been created sometime around 2002-2003 in 4.11 and updated to 6.1 around 2006 I think. It's a Character Record Sheet I made for Rolemaster so not a lot of text, but all the lines are basically tab leaders and if I converted the PDF all of those would break up into individual line segments. NOT what I want to deal with! This is why I keep QXP 8 around though.
It's funny, because I was a die-hard QXP fan for a decade or so, then I forced myself to learn InDesign and it slowly became the only layout app I use at home. I do have QXP, but not for primary use. Now I work for a Quark-centric company and find that some of the things Quark cannot do that are fairly easy with ID are becoming irritating. By now, this die-hard QXP fan is an ID convert. Of course it helps that I long ago just sat there for a few hours and mapped all of QXP's keyboard shortcuts to InDesign as best I could. That shortcut set follows to every InDesign install I use.
But yeah, not a fan of QXP documents. They have a history of going bad at the wrong time.
Continuing this ribbing, we used to call that “the oxymoron” at the service bureau, each and every time someone came in with a diskette with a document saved in “Works”.
It's funny, because I was a die-hard QXP fan for a decade or so, then I forced myself to learn InDesign and it slowly became the only layout app I use at home. I do have QXP, but not for primary use. Now I work for a Quark-centric company and find that some of the things Quark cannot do that are fairly easy with ID are becoming irritating. By now, this die-hard QXP fan is an ID convert. Of course it helps that I long ago just sat there for a few hours and mapped all of QXP's keyboard shortcuts to InDesign as best I could. That shortcut set follows to every InDesign install I use.
But yeah, not a fan of QXP documents. They have a history of going bad at the wrong time.
Admittedly, I still rely on QuarkXPress for stuff I still do (mostly for my needs these days, including a masters thesis I wrote and laid out back in the early teens). Granted, I don’t try to keep up with the annual updates (I credit/blame Adobe for pushing Quark into the yearly-subscription update model). With QXP files, I always it set to run multiple backups and also autosave, because I’ve lost some stuff in the past, as well.
Continuing this ribbing, we used to call that “the oxymoron” at the service bureau, each and every time someone came in with a diskette with a document saved in “Works”.
I had some sort of suite at the time and not having money (or access) to Word at the time AND around the time I actually started saving files to keep rather than using a word processor to spit out some quick pages, this was the default.
Admittedly, I still rely on QuarkXPress for stuff I still do (mostly for my needs these days, including a masters thesis I wrote and laid out back in the early teens). Granted, I don’t try to keep up with the annual updates (I credit/blame Adobe for pushing Quark into the yearly-subscription update model). With QXP files, I always it set to run multiple backups and also autosave, because I’ve lost some stuff in the past, as well.
Quark's problem was it got arrogant and complacent. Adobe capitalized on that, and I think version 7 was probably the last 'Quark like' app. Version 8 changed the interface and there were some other issues I had with it.
I was a Quark forum member from about 2001 to now. Only, I haven't been able to login in years because whatever email account I used is long gone and it keeps sending password reset emails to that account.
I'll just say at this point, that I new a few department head people on the engineering and marketing sides (one crossing over from ALAP) as well as several of the regular engineers. I'm not boasting, it's just that at some point these people started to leave Quark itself and that's when things started to go downhill. The last one I knew of departed sometime in 2020 I think. When all that started happening I knew it was pretty much over as far as being anything 'special'. Quark (the company) is owned by a holding company now (or at least, last I checked). They just want profit. Kind of sad. All these people I communicated with on the Quark forums and via email just all went their separate ways.
Did meet some great people there on the Quark forums though. @designerdave72 sends me a three-sided calendar every year for Christmas. Hi Dave!!!!!
Funny how people looking back see the end of Blockbuster as something sad...I'm just the opposite...I was glad to see them go out of business. Back when I was a kid in the town I lived there were a bunch of really great "Mom and Pop" video stores that each had a lot of personality and were a big part of my childhood. I recall many fond memories of my family renting a VCR (remember how expensive they used to be!!) and picking out a couple of movies to watch together on the weekend. It was great as we all looked around the store and decided together which two movies we all agreed would be the ones we took home. Good times indeed! Anyways, I recall the fateful year when Blockbuster Video came to town and with a couple of years they drove all of the small Mom and Pops out of business. After that the only game in town was generic boring high priced Blockbuster video, gone were all of the unique fun places. It's like having a couple of great atmospheric coffee shops that you love going to and then Starbucks comes to town and they all go under. Anyways, I always hated Blockbuster video for doing that and was super happy to see them go out of business.
This is the same argument I hear when Walmart wants to come to town. The reality is it was the consumer who chose to patronize Blockbuster instead of the mom-and-pop businesses who drove them out of business.
This is the same argument I hear when Walmart wants to come to town. The reality is it was the consumer who chose to patronize Blockbuster instead of the mom-and-pop businesses who drove them out of business.
This is really down to a rural mentality. I used to live rural from the age of 11 to 29 and I know there are two types of people out there. Those who want to live rural because they don't want to deal with everything that comes from living in a city and those who want and try desperately to get out.
I was one of those always trying to get out. But those who want to be there also want their conveniences. Hence mom and pop shops. But, because it's rural, mom and pop can't compete. So really, the blame lies on those who want the rural lifestyle but also want to retain their modern conveniences.
I get your childhood, because to some extent I lived it too, but then you grow up and you start realizing things about rural communities and the cycle repeats (those who want to stay and those who want to get out).
This is the same argument I hear when Walmart wants to come to town. The reality is it was the consumer who chose to patronize Blockbuster instead of the mom-and-pop businesses who drove them out of business.
A case study on each disruptive, post-1980 chain to overwhelm local businesses finds how each relied on dazzle campaigns of promises and uniform branding in what their arrival would portend: if one could find their familiar brand in another location, they could feel “right at home” in an anodyne sort of way. This is a core feature of the McDonaldization of macro-scale business — again, notably after 1980 and accelerating into high gear by 1990.
What each corporation never announced, not publicly, is they were seeking to use their own scaled-up logistics, undercutting tactics (like loss leaders, door crashers, etc.), and manipulating new, free-trade measures (like CUFTA and NAFTA) to completely break A:A competition and to upend the direct relationship between local labour and what entities locally (typically, by insertion of themselves into the local picture) could provide that labour in terms of work opportunities, stability, and seniority.
The cold concession by the chains was for that labour to simply have other (competitive) alternatives, to work and to earn a living locally, be yanked from their kitchen tables. Local businesses lacked those anti-competitive instruments, and thus there was no substantive way to repeat the imported business model — that is: in absence of national, regional, and local regulation around fair competition, anti-dumping, etc..
To put it in blunt language: the Blockbusters, Subways, Wal-Marts, and many others of their model — whether centralized or franchised — wiped out local business with a promise of, vaguely, “being better”. For whom they were “being better” was hinted at in duplicitous manner, but specifically, it was each company’s direct stakeholders which enjoyed those spoils and benefited from the “better”.
It was not better for local businesses, modest cities, large towns, and even entire neighbourhoods within major cities. It was not better for local communities and households, as wages fell, and the means to pick up valuable skills was sidelined for mind-numbing, lowest-common denominator positions (like a “door greeter”).
It produced barren main streets and food deserts. It shunted principal business activity to the outer reaches of a town, devouring hectares upon hectares of once-arable land. It often necessitated the compulsory reliance on a motor vehicle. Circulating revenue, once the lifeblood of local communities, was funnelled out, sent away, and deposited into remote shareholders far from town, leaving behind shattered ghost communities in their wake.
Québec pop band Les Colocs, way back in 1993, picked up on how this was happening and wrote an acerbic commentary in “La rue principal” (lyrics, en français and behind spoiler, in English), on their observed impacts of chain businesses and shopping centres on smaller urban localities.
(Take note: in that particularly French manner, there’s a toss-off line of colonialist racism which would not fly today; that notwithstanding, the rest stays on point.)
[Verse 1]
In my little town there were just four thousand of us
And the main street was called St-Cyrille
The co-op, the gas bar, the pop stand, the undertaker
And the general shop
When I go back it hurts me enough
A bomb fell on the main street
Since they built the mall
[Verse 2]
The other day I brought my beloved
To show where I was born
As soon as I got there I saw myself in a beautiful joualvert [BSM slang translation note: roughly, “hellhole” or “hellscape”] It looked like Val-Jalbert [BSM note: Val-Jabert is Canada’s largest, best preserved ghost town, made into a park in 1960] When I turn round it hurts me enough
A bomb fell on the main street
Since they built the mall
[Chorus]
One good day I'll go back
With my bulldozer
And the mall's gonna spend
A bad quarter of an hour
[Verse 3]
Before the mall got naked
On the main street it was livelier than this
Some asses on bicycles, some cousins visiting
It was as crowded as Africa
When I turn around it's pathetic
So it's not going so well on the main street
Since they built McDonald's
[Bridge]
This is Patrick Esposito Di Napoli
[Chorus]
One good day I'll go back
With my bulldozer
And the mall's gonna spend
A bad quarter of an hour
[Verse 4]
In my little town there could only be three thousand
And the main street's gone quiet
The grocery shop's gone, the movie theatre too
And the motel is demolished
When I go back it hurts me enough
A bomb fell on the main street
Since they built the mall
[Chorus]
One good day I'll go back
With my bulldozer
And the mall's gonna spend
A bad quarter of an hour
[Verse 5]
In my little town there were just four thousand of us
And the main street was called St-Cyrille
The co-op, the gas bar, the pop stand, the undertaker
And the general shop
When I go back it hurts me enough
A bomb fell on the main street
Since they built the mall
[Outro]
The mall, the mall, the mall
The mall!
What has been left behind, in this model’s wake, is a scorched-earth model of capitalism: entire towns and neighbourhoods, now shells of themselves — their commonwealth pilfered and sent far from where they are and where their inhabitants live.
A case study on each disruptive, post-1980 chain to overwhelm local businesses finds how each relied on dazzle campaigns of promises and uniform branding in what their arrival would portend: if one could find their familiar brand in another location, they could feel “right at home” in an anodyne sort of way. This is a core feature of the McDonaldization of macro-scale business — again, notably after 1980 and accelerating into high gear by 1990.
What each corporation never announced, not publicly, is they were seeking to use their own scaled-up logistics, undercutting tactics (like loss leaders, door crashers, etc.), and manipulating new, free-trade measures (like CUFTA and NAFTA) to completely break A:A competition and to upend the direct relationship between local labour and what entities locally (typically, by insertion of themselves into the local picture) could provide that labour in terms of work opportunities, stability, and seniority.
The cold concession by the chains was for that labour to simply have other (competitive) alternatives, to work and to earn a living locally, be yanked from their kitchen tables. Local businesses lacked those anti-competitive instruments, and thus there was no substantive way to repeat the imported business model — that is: in absence of national, regional, and local regulation around fair competition, anti-dumping, etc..
To put it in blunt language: the Blockbusters, Subways, Wal-Marts, and many others of their model — whether centralized or franchised — wiped out local business with a promise of, vaguely, “being better”. For whom they were “being better” was hinted at in duplicitous manner, but specifically, it was each company’s direct stakeholders which enjoyed those spoils and benefited from the “better”.
It was not better for local businesses, modest cities, large towns, and even entire neighbourhoods within major cities. It was not better for local communities and households, as wages fell, and the means to pick up valuable skills was sidelined for mind-numbing, lowest-common denominator positions (like a “door greeter”).
It produced barren main streets and food deserts. It shunted principal business activity to the outer reaches of a town, devouring hectares upon hectares of once-arable land. It often necessitated the compulsory reliance on a motor vehicle. Circulating revenue, once the lifeblood of local communities, was funnelled out, sent away, and deposited into remote shareholders far from town, leaving behind shattered ghost communities in their wake.
Québec pop band Les Colocs, way back in 1993, picked up on how this was happening and wrote an acerbic commentary in “La rue principal” (lyrics, en français and behind spoiler, in English), on their observed impacts of chain businesses and shopping centres on smaller urban localities.
(Take note: in that particularly French manner, there’s a toss-off line of colonialist racism which would not fly today; that notwithstanding, the rest stays on point.)
[Verse 1]
In my little town there were just four thousand of us
And the main street was called St-Cyrille
The co-op, the gas bar, the pop stand, the undertaker
And the general shop
When I go back it hurts me enough
A bomb fell on the main street
Since they built the mall
[Verse 2]
The other day I brought my beloved
To show where I was born
As soon as I got there I saw myself in a beautiful joualvert [BSM slang translation note: roughly, “hellhole” or “hellscape”] It looked like Val-Jalbert [BSM note: Val-Jabert is Canada’s largest, best preserved ghost town, made into a park in 1960] When I turn round it hurts me enough
A bomb fell on the main street
Since they built the mall
[Chorus]
One good day I'll go back
With my bulldozer
And the mall's gonna spend
A bad quarter of an hour
[Verse 3]
Before the mall got naked
On the main street it was livelier than this
Some asses on bicycles, some cousins visiting
It was as crowded as Africa
When I turn around it's pathetic
So it's not going so well on the main street
Since they built McDonald's
[Bridge]
This is Patrick Esposito Di Napoli
[Chorus]
One good day I'll go back
With my bulldozer
And the mall's gonna spend
A bad quarter of an hour
[Verse 4]
In my little town there could only be three thousand
And the main street's gone quiet
The grocery shop's gone, the movie theatre too
And the motel is demolished
When I go back it hurts me enough
A bomb fell on the main street
Since they built the mall
[Chorus]
One good day I'll go back
With my bulldozer
And the mall's gonna spend
A bad quarter of an hour
[Verse 5]
In my little town there were just four thousand of us
And the main street was called St-Cyrille
The co-op, the gas bar, the pop stand, the undertaker
And the general shop
When I go back it hurts me enough
A bomb fell on the main street
Since they built the mall
[Outro]
The mall, the mall, the mall
The mall!
What has been left behind, in this model’s wake, is a scorched-earth model of capitalism: entire towns and neighbourhoods, now shells of themselves — their commonwealth pilfered and sent far from where they are and where their inhabitants live.
I don't understand the nostalgia, I'm sorry. Probably just my bias against rural, but the town I lived in for 18 years had a population of 2000 and a lot of the kids I attended school with were a lot like their parents - bullies. Granted, there were two 'cities' of bigger population to the south but neither had much in chain stores when I was a teen. And without transportation of my own it may have well been 2000 miles away. Same difference.
Today, there are still mom and pop operations in that area, the ones that survived had something of value that the chains did not/do not. Most of those are restaurants, but I can name a few that are in other industries. The ones that folded, they weren't able to offer what the chains did. Or if they did it was more expensive, harder to get and you had to wait for it.
I do not look fondly back on that place of my teenage years. All I wanted to do was get out. The irony is that AFTER I did get out, the chains came in and that place now has most of the things I longed for as a teenager. There are a handful of things I do miss, but they aren't enough to erase what was missing at the time I was growing up there.
And the second irony is that a friend I used to know that waxed on about how great that rural place was as a teen, still lives there - enjoying all the amenities he claimed he never cared about having.
We can go on about all this, but the teenage me who missed chains and malls and bookstores and computer stores and restaurants and the ability to get what I wanted when I wanted, will never see the nostalgia in old rural living. Chains were a godsend and that town is now on the map and has been growing the last 24 years because they finally got some.
I don't understand the nostalgia, I'm sorry. Probably just my bias against rural, but the town I lived in for 18 years had a population of 2000 and a lot of the kids I attended school with were a lot like their parents - bullies. Granted, there were two 'cities' of bigger population to the south but neither had much in chain stores when I was a teen. And without transportation of my own it may have well been 2000 miles away. Same difference.
One: I’m not speaking on nostalgia. I’m speaking on urban theory, urban history, and economic theory, and where, how, and why they share a particular intersection. This is the area of my particular training and education. It is my job to pay notice to patterns, data, and ground-level observations, to comprehend, panned back, what is happening, why it’s happening, and what those long-tail impacts are.
Two: I took considerable effort to underscore how this has been a phenomenon not just in small cities (metropolitan and micropolitan), large towns (“micropolitan”), and small towns (i.e., “rural”), but also in major city neighbourhoods and districts.
I grew up, not terribly unlike you, at least for a time, in Texas. I grew up in a micropolitan-scale small city and also a suburban-exurban offshoot of a major city.
For the latter, I spent considerable amounts of my time, from age 16, in that city’s central neighbourhoods, where the gutting of neighbourhoods and their walkable grocery stores and other low-order goods and services (“low-order” means “everyday” — bakery, greengrocer, dry cleaners, bodega, work clothier, etc.) occurred when “flagship” branches of major chains razed scores of housing stock and plopped giant big box centres with a massive moats for car parking. (This was across what may have once been a city three-by-three-block of housing and other business, wiped from stock.)
The imposition of giant parking lots in the middle of an older neighbourhood in the city clogged streets ill-equipped to handle that kind of everyday vehicular traffic. The big box flagships either had chain satellites in a big box strip format (with the mostly usual major names like Subway, Taco Bell, and Marshall’s), or their moat plan permitted the construction of free-standing mini-strips along its periphery, sharing the same slab of concrete parking.
What I was describing, and what I am saying, is these modes for doing business is deleterious at the localized level, no matter where the locality is or how big or small it is. They are giant carbon-positive sinks, by design, and can only be made carbon-neutral by re-purposing all parking for other uses, such as housing (see: Northgate Mall’s southeast parking quadrant, Seattle, post-2010), or by razing them and re-planning new construction to fit the scale of the surroundings.
I am also factoring the social-economic impacts of flattening the labour pool into menial-level jobs with scant hope for growth, enrichment, or prosperity — typically, jobs with no management accountability unless labour organizes together formally. Profit from these big box anchors don’t stay local. They get shunted off to where shareholders and mutual funds are situated.
This is, literally, the parasitism of the local, interdependent economy of whatever scale being examined. This is not new knowledge: urban planners have been aware of this for several decades, but unless they can evince an incontrovertible and compelling (i.e., not wonky, boring) case to the public of the damage being caused (and motivating their councillors to make substantive decisions on future planning and zoning), then the inertia to change an entrenched model, post-1990ish, can be a difficult ask.
And factoring the above, culminating from decades of papers analyzing real estate data, labour data, land-use data, sociological data, and so on, I can say personally that the large city I spent that time, from age 16, may have been the sixth-largest city on this continent by population, but it was still too small a city for me. So I left.
Today, there are still mom and pop operations in that area, the ones that survived had something of value that the chains did not/do not. Most of those are restaurants, but I can name a few that are in other industries. The ones that folded, they weren't able to offer what the chains did. Or if they did it was more expensive, harder to get and you had to wait for it.
I do not look fondly back on that place of my teenage years. All I wanted to do was get out. The irony is that AFTER I did get out, the chains came in and that place now has most of the things I longed for as a teenager. There are a handful of things I do miss, but they aren't enough to erase what was missing at the time I was growing up there.
I relate to that and I cannot blame you, even as where I wanted to leave was more than just a city or a state.
The chains to have come into those places you longed to leave: how have they enriched people who work and live there? How are they economically than their generational forebears in the same locality in, say, the 1960s or 1970s? How is the aggregate mental wellness of those communities today? Is there an uptick of addiction epidemics, of ageing out the demography, and of people who have no better prospect after high school than to ask, “Welcome to Wendy’s, may I take your order,” or “Plumbing products are on aisle 17,” until retirement?
These may not be readily visible to someone who isn’t living there any longer, but it would be to those who remained there, for whatever reason (including, as is not infrequent, taking care of infirm relatives).
And the second irony is that a friend I used to know that waxed on about how great that rural place was as a teen, still lives there - enjoying all the amenities he claimed he never cared about having.
We can go on about all this, but the teenage me who missed chains and malls and bookstores and computer stores and restaurants and the ability to get what I wanted when I wanted, will never see the nostalgia in old rural living. Chains were a godsend and that town is now on the map and has been growing the last 24 years because they finally got some.
I don’t have any nostalgia to offer or share here.
I do have an informed awareness that how we’ve grown as a society, under this model of capitalism (which pulls commonwealth from localities and impoverishes them), cannot be sustained much longer, at least with the built environment dropped in place within our lifetime, without a cascade of troubling matters being impossible to circumnavigate — much of it adjacent to the long-term habitability of locality at the decadal, within-the-span-of-one-lifetime scale.
When we gut localities with chains whose shareholders aren’t even in the same time zone, we are treating local-level health like a latrine or a landfill. This too is unsustainable (and also a bit dystopian) in the long-term.
That's exactly how my parents felt about their respective time growing up in rural locations. They each left home at 18 and my father once remarked that a visit to his home-town would convey to me first-hand the circumstances that spurred him on to flee far away - in a journey that would make for a tremendous travelogue.
Most taxis refused to travel to my mother's home-town for fear that the road would destroy their vehicles. The bus service ran twice a day: 5am and 5pm. I made the best of it and never complained but I understood very quickly why she "got the hell out of Dodge" and has never contemplated returning to live there on a permanent basis.
