Hamilton, Ontario. When remembering a family-owned grocery store in rural Virginia, a first image comes to mind, even though I did not actually witness it. This is my boss, a woman standing all of five feet tall, in the front parking lot after closing time in her “shooting stance” with her gun out. While counting the money for the night, she watched two young men pull up in a car and start removing various firearms from their trunk. Walking around from the side exit, she got the jump on them. What she then said (edited for sensitive eyes) was: “I don’t know what (censored) you’re doing, but I’m the only one licensed to have a gun on my (censored) property. If you try to use that gun, you might hit me. But I will kill you.”  They left.

The second image I have is of their grown son, my manager, calling all of the store employees in for a meeting one evening and yelling for an hour straight at us. Some of the kids working there were less than cordial to the customers. A partial transcript (also edited for language): “Look! This is my store! This is my livelihood! And you are not going to put me out of business because you can’t be (edited) polite to the customers! When they come in, say hello! Stop whatever the (edited) you are doing and go talk to them! Get to know their names and what they come here for! And, you know what, ask them how they’re doing! The only way we can beat the big grocery stores is if you get to know these people and treat them better than those stores do!”

So we did. We knew all the customers, their kids, what sort of beer they drank, and spent at least half our working hours chatting (or jawboning, if you’ll indulge me) with them. We knew who the hunters were, whose daughter had leukemia, who was leaving her abusive husband, and we especially knew what kind of meat they bought. Our store had two specialties: our meat was excellent and we kept the beer fridge at one degree above freezing, so it was still cold when you reached your house.

The family also treated me, a kid working to save money for university, like a family member. When I finally went off to college, they gave me a “care package” that consisted of about two years worth of soap, shampoo, razors, and all sorts of other things. Every Christmas, we ate the turkey they gave me. When my grandmother passed away, they sent the largest floral arrangement at the funeral home.

When the store closed last year, it was on the local news. People who were interviewed compared the place to Cheers, where “everybody knows your name”. The reporter pointed out that the family had owned a store in that town- first a general store and then a grocery- for over a hundred and twenty years. They did not know that the family’s great-great grandfather had actually named the town.

Why did the store go under? Here’s where I repeat myself. First, a wave of people moved to town trying to get away from the big city and they brought with them box stores and enormous box homes. Secondly, the bottom fell out of the real estate market. People started defaulting on their mortgages, and more people were holding on by their fingernails. Suddenly, going to Enormo-Mart for groceries at a cut rate price, even if they don’t say Hi to you, made sense. Lastly, there was no way that the small family store could get the same deals from suppliers that the huge chains do because they could never buy in the same sort of bulk. The truck drivers charged them more, the suppliers charged them more; finally, they were paying more for items than Enormo-Mart was charging the customers. Few people could afford to pay more for groceries; after all, the middle class was dying off in that town. At last, they threw in the towel.

Philip Rieff once argued that the central institution of our social life had been the cathedral; then the courthouse; and finally the hospital. (I’m paraphrasing; if you want accurate Rieff quotations, see James Poulos.) Can we now replace the hospital with the mall, that hub of our anti-cultural life? Or should we move on to the slough of despond?

As for the family, they still live in town, but they’d leave if they could sell their house. The kids got other jobs, while their parents, who are in their 60s and have both been through serious surgeries in the last year, are trying to figure out what to do next. Their house is not large at all, but now it’s “too much house” for them. She can’t really walk after a hip replacement and he has no balance after having a growth removed from his brain. The son has crone’s disease. When it rains, it (censored) pours, eh?

When they started out in the family business, they were middle class, and now they’re below the poverty level in their late 50s. When my father started out as a lobsterman, he was working class, and now he’s below the poverty level. Just about everyone I know is adjusting to downward mobility.

Our political conversation still seems removed from this reality. I think Christopher Lasch was right: the doctrine of progress without limits still animates the political left and right, with meager hopes on the right that moral limits might return and on the left that a few ecological limits might be recognized. Otherwise, it’s business as usual: what’s striking in our current debates is that the left hopes to return to the time before the econolypse with a few state protections to soften the blow of the middle class’s continued cultural and economic impoverishment; while the right hopes to return to the time before with a bit less state intrusion into that impoverishment, and a talk show for Sarah Palin.

In terms of culture, the laughs come more bitterly. For three decades, the GOP has paid lip service to the values, virtues, beliefs, and ethos of people just like these, while championing the same economic systems, with their winner-take-all ethos, “no limits”, and instant gratification, that has always been against that culture. Say what you will about Marx; at least he recognized that capitalism would eventually destroy traditional cultures; he just called it a good thing because it would set the stage for communism. After all, no one could live like this forever. All of history shows that widespread inequality makes a mockery of civic virtue.

In the meantime, the DNC would like a bit more education/therapy to guide people through the destruction of their “outdated” way of life. The things those people say, think, and believe are rather embarrassing after all, in particular, their underlying sense that life is tragic and their skepticism that progress is anything but piecemeal and always reversible. Instead, we should have hope. For what? God knows. Just so long as we don’t have tradition.

Most of all, these people are at odds with progress because they have a sense of limits: economic, political, moral, and ecological, that the wider culture cannot acknowledge, even as it pushes up against them. But, we are pushing up against them, and that’s the final punch line. After all, the sort of limits that I sense the FPR is seeking to restore to mental life are not reactionary, outdated, socialist, or unreasonable. They’re the new reality after the econolypse.

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1. Jawboning: A Tale of Two Hardware Stores Hamilton, Ontario. …The other day I was standing in a...

Hamilton, Ontario. The other day I was standing in a cavernous mega-chain hardware store looking for gardening supplies. This was not an easy task because the store, which we can call Triumph of the Drill, had something like 36 aisles, each of which was bisected, making 72 aisles. In addition, there was a full service garage for auto repairs, and an outdoor patio selling mulch and fertilizer, but sadly, no gardening supplies. The complexity of the store was incredible; you’d need a PhD to fully understand it.

The staff at Triumph of the Drill are not much help. As is the norm in retail, the workers are in their teens or early twenties, and they tend to avoid helping the customers. At one point, I was chasing down a young man to ask where a watering pot might be found.

It is normal for middle-class suburbanites like me to complain about help in these places. The ideal is quick, efficient, and convenient; the help is supposed to be obsequious, but fade into the background. It is an impersonal business model and this extends to employment: the workers are paid minimum wage and scheduled as close to forty hours per week as possible without triggering the legally-required full time benefits; they’re fired at will and they are generally treated as interchangeable. Of course, they have no loyalty to Triumph of the Drill. I don’t blame them.

In fact, what’s most noteworthy about these retail stores is how little social interaction there is between customers/workers, and workers/managers. Standing around and jawboning is frowned upon and often impossible. The customers are in a hurry; interactions are supposed to be quick, efficient, and convenient. It’s amazing to think of the entire generation that grew up with this retail world as their model of the public sphere and of capitalism.

For me, a hardware store brings to mind something completely different. My family owned a hardware store in the little town where I was born, a family business established by my grandfather and his brother Jack after the war. For a time, there were only three businesses in that town: the hardware store, a grocery store, and a diner. The three of them not surprisingly became the hubs of social life.

People stood around and “jawboned”. I remember, as a child, staring up at these pudgy middle-aged men in the sawdusty back room of the store, all of them drinking coffee and commiserating about the issues of the day, while endless cigarettes smoldered in a communal ashtray between them. Husbands, local builders, friends of the family, they often whiled away entire mornings this way. It was not quick, efficient, or particularly convenient. But it was human.

This was, for a time, what civic life and business were in that town: face to face, deeply personal, and slow-cooked. These men worked odd jobs for each other, met at Lion’s Club socials, visited on holidays, and wasted a lot of time together. To my knowledge, there was never a single item shoplifted from that store. The kid who worked at the store became the man who worked at the store, and then the owner. Even after our family turned it over to him, he kept our name on the sign.

The town changed around the time I went through puberty, and just as painfully. People who worked for the tech companies an hour away started moving in en masse. With them came a wave of strip malls and condos. Fly-by-night real estate developers found that county government was obsequious, but faded into the background. The little hardware store was soon barricaded in by highways, interchanges, chain stores, strip malls, and cloverleaves. The bank across the street is now a porn shop.

The newcomers did not want to jawbone; they wanted the staff to shut the hell up and get them their damned nails. The store couldn’t compete with the large mega chains that could get bulk deals from suppliers. Everything was more expensive at the little hardware store. The local customers gradually died off and were not replaced. The landlord raised the rent until they were forced to move to a very small space in a local strip mall, and then he tore down the oldest building in the town for a chain theme restaurant. Adding insult to injury, the local paper ran an article marking the passing of “the old 7-11” nearby. But, hey, what can you do? You can’t stop progress, as the people who benefit from it are wont to tell us.

It’s impossible for me to think about the “republic” of old hardware store men in terms of politics. Certainly, their culture was traditional, even a bit old-fashioned, conservative, quietly religious, and all of them voted Republican. They had no cultural affiliation with left wing party politics. Ultimately, while the county Republicans (who controlled local politics at that time,) might have issued some kind statements about the salt of the earth common people who had built the town, the politicians were glad to see these people go. The box stores employ more people and generate more wealth, so why should anyone shed a tear over a bunch of deadbeats in a mom & pop store?

Perhaps even I can’t. The hardware store provided a lot of people with very nice lives and then faded quietly away. The family friend and owner eventually died, and the store died with him.

I now live in another town dominated by these box stores. I find, though, that the social life in this town is quick, efficient, and convenient. But without jawboning; that is, without a direct, face-to-face sense of the other people we are connected to; it is less geared towards human life, which is not quick, efficient, or convenient; at least, not when it’s worth taking part in. It’s like Triumph of the Drill; after a while, you feel a bit superfluous there. In most regards, you are interchangeable and insignificant. The young people I meet couldn’t care less about their society. I can’t blame them.

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