Shopping at 2 AM
astrofish.net
Yeah, Shopping at 2 AM —
what it is really about?
When I started with the comparison, the retail giant Wal-Mart was a family owned, American-Made operation that concentrated on fair prices for products. There was no “vertical supply chain integration,” no hackneyed marketing jargon, none of that. Simply solid products, cheap, mostly made in the USA.
In my much younger years, there was a series of lovers who worked the evening shift. Night shift? Kind of depends, but the end of the shift was well after midnight. Breakfast was supper, usually at Kerby Lane or Magnolia — old Austin.
That was the original source of this data, The inspiration for the comparison, “Shopping at 2 AM.” First off, the store was patriotic, not a corporate giant that chewed up souls and landscape, and then, there was always that local element.
Each store had a character that reflected its location, and the old South Austin store was incredibly rich, for me, it was pure entertainment. As a much younger version, I could easily be out at 3 AM, with the aforementioned girlfriends, seeing what was what in the old Austin night.
Austin was a small town, then, really aggressively leftist and working that weird angle.
Before it was a mantra, then chamber of commerce slogan, I was known for an Austin weirdness quotient all my own. Wear that with pride, baby.
Alas, they paved paradise, and put up a shopping mall — more typically, the urbane blight of four-story structures that have some kind of housing on the top floors, with retail “casually integrated” on the ground floor.
Every trip into Austin, like carcinogenic urban blight that has metastasize, there’s a new location under construction.
The shopping at 2 AM was supposed to be “Shopping at Wal-Mart at 2 AM.”
Growth, “progress,” and the ver-forward march of time leaves the original intent discolored.
