Ever have one of those simple misconceptions from childhood that bleeds over into adult life? You know, one of those things that you got in your head as a kid, something that seemed logical, and it just stuck until you had a definitive mental map reconstructing moment that put things on the right track? I’ll give you an example. I knew Washington was a state. I knew Washington D.C. was the capital of the country. Naturally I assumed that someone had parked D.C. in the state of Washington. Why would they be on opposite sides of the country? It took an embarrassing snafu in fifth grade geography to set me straight.
Same with agoraphobia. I’d heard and read the word enough in context to think I knew what it meant: a fear of large spaces. It took junior high Latin and, by association, Greek to find out that the root, literally translated, was fear of the marketplace. It took walking into my first Super Ultra Mega Do You Like What We’ve Done With This City Block Consume Anything Your Greedy Heart Desires Welcome Back to America For the First Time in Two Years Sucka Wal Mart to really, really understand agoraphobia.
I traveled to Texas while on vacation and, on a whim and the need to feed a super premium jones, I entered a Super Wal-Mart in an effort to make up for two years of ice cream deprivation. Everything’s bigger in Texas, but Lordy I wasn’t prepared for what happened as the automatic doors hissed apart at my approach.
I took two steps inside and froze, woodland creature in headlights, completely overwhelmed and confused. Fluorescent lit space disappeared into the unfathomable distance in all directions. Cavernous, yawning commercialism stretched as far as I could see. The hugeness was staggering. Those patient enough to have read some of my other entries know I’m not above hyperbole to make a point, but I kid you not, my chest actually tightened, my breathing became labored, my vision started to tunnel, and I broke out in a prickly sweat. I make a living squeezing my body into small, dark, claustrophobic places inside collapsing shipwrecks, and here I was, in a store, the most innocuous of places, panting, jelly kneed, fight or flight response fluttering. I backed up against the wall just inside the door and put my hands on the gumball and temporary tattoo machines to steady myself.
Super Wal-Mart. Ultra K-Mart. Mega Target. Did we really need to supersize these already massive establishments? Only in America could a bunch of guys sit around the board room and decide to take America’s largest indoor business establishments and make them bigger. “I know what old Sam Walton would have wanted. Let’s EXPAND. Not just our store numbers. Our internal volume. Our footprint.” Can you picture it? “We’ve already undersold small town America into oblivion, wrecking every local business economy we enter. But the grocery stores are still in business. There’s a slice of middle America’s paycheck we aren’t getting. We should do something about that.”
I finally got over the fact that I was standing in a store that had a greater volume of retail space than every store in the town in which I live put together, and far more stock, to boot. I remember getting off the live-aboard in Kona after a long stint at sea and wandering around a regular Wal-Mart thinking that it was like being in downtown NYC, but this feeling was somehow different. In Chuuk, people are content with little, mainly by necessity. They’d be just as happy to have the cardboard container or the wooden pallet in which all the merchandise I was seeing was packed, much less the contents. I was standing in a space, a huge space, where you could get, well, anything. By design, you can go into Super Wal-Mart with a wildly diverse list of needs and errands and knock out every one, from grocery, appliance, garden, kitchen, and electronics shopping to meals, a health check-up, bank visit, and a new set of prescription glasses.
I guess I don’t have to tell you guys; you can see it any time you want, and I envy that on many levels. Point is, people ask me what strikes me as different in the US since I left. Being on a bus full of people absorbed by the data devices whose screens they are poking and massaging, relating not a bit to the outside world or anyone in it until their PDA’s GPSs tell them they have arrived where they are going; that’s different. Successful business models for artisanal bakeries and chocolatiers that make nothing but seven dollar cupcakes or thirty dollars a pound chocolates; that’s different. Having a mobile pet grooming service willing to arrive at my doorstep in a small RV and wash my pet; that’s different. Seeing someone in a type of shoe other than a flip flop and driving down at a road at double digit speed, both very different. Turning on the internet and having a web page load up instantly is certainly different.
People also ask me what I’ve missed in the US since I left. The food, the variety, going to a movie theater or a museum, those things I’ve missed. Super Wal-Mart? Not so much.
