Retail industry greed just cost me $15

Friends, Bellevuans, Highland Heightsians, lend me your ears; I come not to bury Amazon, but to bury the big box retail industry.

About a month ago, I buyed a box of ArtSkills markers at Kroger so I could make a poster for an Occupy rally. I got this brand because they're the only kind of multicolored permanent markers Kroger has.

Today I used these markers to start on a poster for Saturday's Occupy rally against right-wing media bias. The brown marker - which was absolutely essential for some of the lettering - promptly fell apart. The ink column fell out of the marker, rendering the marker useless. And it's not as if the other markers are praiseworthy either, since they start to run out of ink the very first time you use them.

I checked all the other stores in the area and couldn't find any permanent markers at all. The grocery up the street only has babyish washables. Try using those for a poster in a rainy climate. See what happens.

Now, when I talk about checking other businesses "in the area", I mean that literally. I don't mean within driving distance. I mean within biking distance. That's what "in the area" means. Our cities are poor, our public transit is broken, and people don't always have cars anymore. "In the area" means accessible to a majority of residents.

So the only place I could get a permanent brown marker was to order it off Amazon. And since I had to have it by Saturday, I had to pay extra for shipping. Shipping cost more than a box of markers. It's $15 just for shipping.

I wouldn't have had to pay shipping if we were still able to buy things locally. And we can't buy it locally because the big box retailers have set up shop 15 miles out of town and undercut the stores in the cities. So our stores fold. And people starve. Some built-up areas no longer have any grocery stores, period. It's not just office supplies we have to worry about. It's also food, medicine, toothpaste, and other goodies. I've known for years that our food choices were already somewhat limited because of Corporate America's unchecked greed.

In my day, there was a crazy little thing called zoning. It said you couldn't build things willy-nilly if it infringed on someone else's rights. This wasn't just to safeguard against immediately visible woes like soil erosion, but also economic vagaries like food deserts and predatory monopolies. But these days, anything goes - just as long as you're not trying to buy Sudafed.

This is why we need to halt construction of big box stores - from now into eternity.