Chain, chain, chain

In that same December issue of The Atlantic Monthly with its list of Uninteresting Americans (see below: A Hole in the Atlantic), Virginia Postrel argues that chain stores are good for us.

There's much to be said for chains. As irrritatingly ubiquitous as it is, Starbucks, for instance, has transformed coffee in this country, generally for the better. Twenty years ago, good-quality cappucinos and lattes were nearly nonexistent in many parts. And before there was Amazon.com, the bookstore chains Borders and Barnes & Noble brought a wide range of literature to many areas of the country that had never seen so many books before.

But chain improvements often come with a price. Starbucks, for instance, charges a steep toll for a cup of ordinary joe. In Ms. Postrel's hometown of Dallas, I can go to Wild about Harry's, a favorite local hot-dog-and-custard stand, and buy a nice coffee for 95 cents. Less than a block away, Starbucks will sell me pretty much the same thing for nearly three times that amount. And it's Starbucks' prices that one increasingly sees in coffeehouses across America.

As is characteristic of Ms. Postrel -- who makes much of her living enthusiastically defending suburbia and the great changes wrought by corporate commercialism --she wisks away this kind of unpleasantness. Her article's basic argument is that the widespread notion that chains have increased the "sameness" of America -- made it all so cookie-cutter boring that it has become "the geography of nowhere" -- that notion is completely wrong. Even if it weren't wrong, this kind of gloomy liberal-urban-media snobbery always seems to set her teeth on edge.

And she's right. There's still a lot of local color out there, if one looks beyond the 7-11 clutter. And the 'lost' local color we often pine for was precisely the kind that wouldn't have wanted most of us: It was small-minded, xenophobic. Also, for many people in small towns, a new, nearby Best Buy -- as with a new Borders -- has often meant a major uptick in convenience and wider access to goods.

Let's not get into what a new Wal-Mart has or has not meant for them.

The problem is that Ms. Postrel makes it easy on her chainstores-are-wonderful argument. She goes to Chandler, Arizona, outside of Phoenix, and notes that even with all those same-same-same chains, the town is still very distinct from, say, New England or the Carolinas.

Yes, one must admit that the Arizona desert is a wee bit different from New England's wet pine trees. But if Ms. Postrel were suddenly transported to a mysterious subdivision of my choosing, she would be hard-pressed, I would think, to tell if she were in a northern suburb of Dallas, a northern suburb of Houston or a northern suburb of San Antonio (unless a sign told her). And those three cities are in distinct physiographic areas -- from blackland prairie to sub-tropical grassland to Texas' Hill Country.

For those people who think, well, that's just three cities in Texas -- not fully grasping how wildly various the geography is in the Lone Star State -- we can shift our test to three Midwestern states. I sincerely doubt it's all that easy to distinguish portions of many of the suburbs of Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinatti, Toledo and Chicago. I've been there.

It's revealing that in her description of Chandler, Ms. Postrel doesn't linger over the fact that it's no longer a farm community. She's not one for that kind of back-to-the-earth nostalgia, and neither am I. But it's also a necessary part of her change-is-good strategy: Ms. Postrel must denigrate what we've "lost." The local "mom & pop" retailers were unimpressive, and it's no great shakes that they went under: "The range of retailing ideas in any given town was rarely that great. One deli or diner or lunch counter or cafeteria was pretty much like every other one. A hardware store was a hardware store."

One wonders if Ms. Postrel has ever looked through a hardware store for something other than an appliance or a name-brand house paint. Even the chains -- other than Lowe's or Home Depot -- can be significantly different. In Dallas, one will search futilely for particular brackets or specialty bolts in an Ace Hardware, but one will most likely find them at Elliott's, which has an impressive stock of oddities and doohickies, although not as many paint options as the big chains. In Detroit, where I grew up, hardware stores, not unexpectedly, sold a much wider range of automotive parts than one finds today in any Home Depot. Conversely, other Detroit hardware stores were little more than lumber yards with some plumbing supplies on the side. I am not arguing that any of these were better than a Home Depot, but contra Ms. Postrel, they had very different, very individual inventories.

What makes Ms. Postrel's arguments often so challenging -- why she regularly finds work at places like The Atlantic -- is her eagerness to get beyond the usual mindsets. She was for the war in Iraq, for example, and voted for Bush, but, frankly, never liked him much -- a position that has the added bonus of leaving her unsurprised and not particularly disillusioned when it became plain that Bush misled the country about ... well, about all those reasons Ms. Postrel must have had for going to war.

Ms. Postrel almost always does battle with the Received Wisdom (generally liberal but not always) because the Received Wisdon, by its nature, is statist and she, as her website declares, is a happy "dynamist" (her term). Hers is a very American enthusiasm: Let us ride the waves of change. Change is progress, the future is good, new technology is good, the free market that delivers new goods and change is good. Anyone who questions these syllogisms is grumpy, backwards-looking, repressive and un-American.

What often makes Ms. Postrel's energetic arguments irksome, however, is her determined obliviousness to any downside to the free market or mass-market values. Sell the people what they want; stick another Gap store in there. CEOs deserve the rewards they can get from their chums on the board, no matter how poor their company performs, because that's the law of supply and demand.

Because this post has gone on long enough, you'll have to go to the jump to read my "Grumpy Background Disclosure."