The paper played it as a sign of hard times in the music industry, noting that the number of independent music stores has dropped by half in the last 10 years. But for my money, the demise of Aron's is symptomatic of something larger: Mom and Pop are dying. Or at least, starting to smell funny.

You remember Mom and Pop, right? Mr. and Mrs. Small Business? Used to own that diner down the street, that coffee shop around the corner, that record store across town? Used to run that bookstore with the long aisles of dusty paperbacks where you could while away a rainy afternoon browsing to your heart's content. They gave the neighborhood personality. They gave it soul.

There are many reasons why a business might fail. As for music stores, they have had a very rough time of late. As anyone with an internet connection knows, that industry has experienced nothing short of a tectonic shift since the introduction of Napster in the summer of 1999. Independent records stores have been hit especially hard. So too has the book industry since the introduction of Amazon. But it doesn't necesarily follow that neighborhoods have lost their souls because local record stores or bookstores have shut down in greater numbers. Who could disagree that electronic distribution and production have allowed more people around the world, including those living so-called soulless neighborhoods, to get exposed to music and books they might have never found otherwise? Who doesn't know that these techniques have faciliated finding small but profitable target audiences for previously only marginally-profitable artists?

Then somebody bought them out, knocked down the building and put up a Wal-Mart. Or a Starbucks. Or a box store with low prices, huge selection, and all the soul of tuna fish on white bread. And one by one those storied places, yours and mine, winked out of existence.

The big are eating the small. Indeed, ask Bob Perry of Blue Note Records in North Miami Beach what business is like for independent music sellers like him and the first word out of his mouth is, “Sucks.”

“It's very, very bad,” he adds. Perry says his store thrives only because he's diversified: he sells posters, memorabilia and does Internet auctions.

This is a truly astonishing piece of commentary. First of all it contradicts the earlier unstated assumption that small firms, aka Mom & Pop, can't compete with the big boxes. There is ample evidence, both anecdotal and empirical, that they can and do. And the author tells us how they do when informs us that Blue Notes "thrives only because (it) diversified." And by using the internet no less. Horror of horrors! But seriously, it is important to state that running a business is anything but an entitlement. No one that does so has any right to expect that customer tastes and behavior will remain constant, that competitors will stay away, that substitute products won't come into existence, that new technolgies won't obviate some or all of what they have done so well for so long. The choice here is simple: adapt or don't- and die.

This is not the business page, I know. But this lament is not for lost business. Rather, it's for a loss of – here's that word again – soul. Meaning the things that once made our communities unique.

Drive across the country these days and “unique” is not a word that comes often to mind. Increasingly, Richmond could be Rochester could be Dayton could be Duluth. We shop at cookie-cutter stores in cookie-cutter malls and eat at cookie-cutter restaurants, not because the food is special but because it is familiar.

Alliteration and anaphora aside, these seven sentences are remarkably peevish. By definition, small businesses are not able, by virtue of their limited resources and scale and scope, to meet the demands of a large number of customers with the consistency that the "customer service" revolution led us to expect. What one person castigates as "cookie cutter" another may see as "consumer surplus" created by economies of scale. On the other hand, no matter how big the "big box" stores get they can never do everything or be all things to all customers.

But size is not destiny. Nor does it spell doom for everything and everyone smaller. In fact, the bigger & squarier those boxes get, the harder and sharper their corners become, the more, not less, opportunity there is for Mom and Pop to provide the personalized, localized service that their community of souls presumably values. Sage Against the Machine is but one example I've written about on this blog relating to how small companies can and do routinely profit, generally after some serious and painful readjustment, when the big chains come to town. And here is a link to an entire series of articles from Fortune Small Business that take up the issue.

A former colleague called it the Wal-Martification of America. It's as good a term as any for the process by which we become uniform. And regionalisms – that thing they say only in Cincy, that funky bookstore in lower Manhattan, that dish you can get only in that little dive in Jackson – become fewer and farther between.

Progress is inexorable, so I suppose there's nothing to do but wave Mom and Pop goodbye and mourn what they represent, a world before Velcro and digital clocks where families watched TV together and neighbors knew one another by name. Not to sentimentalize. Time passes, yes. Things change. But man, Aron's was my place. And I'm sorry, but amazon.com just ain't the same.

Progress is inexorable only so long as their are people striving to do so. Fortunately ours is a culture that still places a premium on rewarding the individual initiative and organizational action upon which progress depends. But why say "Wal-Martification" like some kind of slur rather than as an appreciation of the fact that souls live in cities and neighborhoods and bodies that need food, shelter, and clothing. What's so difficult about giving credit to the big box stores for meeting those needs in a manner and to a degree that Mom and Pop never dreamed?

Also on this blog:

The Political Dimensions of the War on Wal-Mart and Five Forces Analysis of Wal-Mart and The Economic Impact of Wal-Mart and The Empire Strikes Back or the entire Wal-Mart series
Linked to: Don Surber | Pirate King

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