Just Feel a Compelling Need for a F**king Rant!

Just went out for a few groceries along my favorite routes: along the Danforth from Donlands to Chester, and found out that one of its pivotal businesses is about to close. It will be replaced by a Rexall drug store which will be one of three large chain drug stores in a four block stretch.

Sun Valley Foods has been in the neighborhood for the past three decades. It is a family run business that caters to the local community and I (and many, many others) have found it to be a true pleasure to shop at -- a delightful staff, quality food and reasonable prices.

But they are unable to compete with what is increasingly a duopoly that controls the Ontario grocery business. Despite the fact that the store was packed every day of the week it could no longer maintain profit margins. So rather than taking the subway to an excellent grocery store that buys and sells locally, we will be more and more compelled to drive to a megachain, park in their untaxed parking lot and buy whatever shit, trucked in from whatever third world hellhole, that they decide to serve up. And a shopping district that is one of the best in the city will lose one of its anchor businesses. Inevitably, other businesses will begin to be shuttered.

And this is the real tragedy. A vibrant, alive and pedestrian and cycle oriented streetscape will begin to become just one more corridor for moving cars from suburb to downtown. The spillover value that businesses such as this provide is never recognized until it is gone. Though the jobs are important, it is so much more than jobs.

And it seems to me that as citizens, if we truly give a shit about this, we have to begin to live differently. First, we can spend differently. We can refuse to shop at the major chains no matter how enticing or convenient. And when we stop for a coffee while out shopping we can not make it a Starbucks but instead stop in at a locally owned cafe (or bar, heaven forbid in these puritan times). In other words, rather than blathering on about a hundred mile diet and such nonsense, we can live a life of two or three mile shopping, sans car and at locally owned businesses.

We can also start taxing parking lots as developed land and start pricing gasoline at its social cost, all externalities in, so that we recognize, where it hurts, that driving and parking aren't free and that they impose huge costs. In short, we can start pricing the collective aspects of our lives as if we actually care about liveable urban environments. Or I guess we could simply give up and move to fucking Scarborough.