Store Closing
They built another box store on the other side of town, so the same chain closed its old box store and moved operations to the new one. Doubtless they got tax credits for building the new one, employing contractors to revitalize the economy and all that. Doubtless, the tax credits will last a lot longer than the employment of builders.
Ecosystems emerge around large organisms, economic as much as biological. The chinese buffet nearby is suffering. The fast food has already closed, and the video rental is to follow: a young man in a blue golf shirt stands outside, holding a sign on a piece of strapping as though protesting the loss of his job. Everything Must Go, the sign reads. Store Fixtures, Video Inventory — Take it Away!
The employees are happier than I have ever seen them, and I have visited this video rental in the past. They josh around loudly, and talk to the customers more readily. I think that, if the store had had this degree of friendliness and service while it was a video rental, it might have succeeded despite itself. Certainly, I would have been more frequent. Video store clerks are — and here I speak generally — the newer, younger, more pimply-faced librarians: bothered to help, and your requests are suspicious when they are not foolish. Rental takes as much sales as sales does.
The store surprises me with its selection — I had not noticed, in the past, that it stocked so many foreign films, so much drama, so many stories that challenge me to understand them and to understand myself. In my experience, the store had been a source of loud explosions, carefully choreographed and preserved in film; busty women in broad comedy; the sort of entertainments my neighbor used to call “mind twinkies.”
I overhear one employee explain: the video rental is indeed closing, due to reduced traffic from the absence of the big box store across the way. But before it closes, it is an outlet for all the surplus of the other rental places in its chain. They take a delivery every day. It is crossing the line between liquidation and retail. Some of these movies never lived here, but here is where they will leave the chain of commerce.
I wonder, too, at the uncharacteristic enjoyment the staff seem to take in liquidating the place out. I wonder whether they worked here while it was a video rental, whether they got crushes on one another and hated their boss and got frustrated at the customers and will look back fondly on the time here, or whether they, like the movies they are liquidating, are brought in from outside to conduct the closing of a place that was someone else’s first job, someone else’s way to pay driver ed school and save up for a car, someone else’s place to escape being home for the holidays, and over the summer.
I wonder, and I feel no real sadness for the closing of the video rental — live by the chain, die by the chain after all — but I wonder whether anyone has carved enough space within these walls to let this be home, in the way that work sometimes becomes home. I wonder if it is any of these young people, these laughing liquidators, if they seem happy to see the place go because it was never a home to anyone, or because it was never a home to them.
It has started to rain. The young man outside has put on a jacket, which advertises the store across his shoulders. He continues to picket the store. The End is Nigh, he says. Everything Must Go.
gauche
04 Dec 09
