3 ms·
You can blame the consumers who still flock to the chain stores. You can blame the landlords for choosing money over culture. You can't really blame the chain s
by m1sta_ 10y ago
You can blame the consumers who still flock to the chain stores. You can blame the landlords for choosing money over culture. You can't really blame the chain stores in this instance, they're just meeting demand.
- DanAndersen 10y ago"Blame" is such a distracting word in all of this. It leads to this weird punching back and forth between which group can be looked at as unfortunate victims of social forces and influences or economics or "just trying their best to maximize shareholder value", and which groups are consciously "at fault." We somehow need to develop a language where we can talk about priorities that also include the unquantifiable, the fuzzy, and the hard-to-articulate. If all that enters the political calculus is purchasing power for consumers (and people only being consumers), and companies only being about making money without also being about building and maintaining communities and cultures, then society turns into a paperclip-maximizing GDP-chasing hideous machine where we end up losing things that we valued yet did not realize we valued.
- dopamean 10y agoI wasn't really trying to "blame" anyone.