{"id":42411,"date":"2019-01-08T09:37:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-08T14:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42411"},"modified":"2019-01-08T10:10:04","modified_gmt":"2019-01-08T15:10:04","slug":"a-farewell-to-bargain-shopping-clusterfuck-nation-for-your-reading-pleasure-mondays-and-friday-support-this-blog-by-visiting-jims-patreon-page-may-god-save-the-c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=42411","title":{"rendered":"A Farewell to \u201cBargain Shopping\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Farewell to \u201cBargain Shopping\u201d<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cMay God save the country for it is evident the people will not.\u201d
\n<\/strong><\/em>\u2014Millard Fillmore, 13th<\/sup> POTUS, born this day, 1800<\/p>\n

France has its Yellow Vests. Here in USA, we have a few poor shlubs hoisting the \u201cGoing Out of Business\u201d signs on the highway in front of the K-Mart. The store in my little flyover town in upstate New York announced that it would shutter in March, and the sign-hoisting shlubs appeared out on Route 29 the first Saturday in January, an apt kick-off to a nervous new year. K-Mart\u2019s parent company, Sears, is moving into liquidation, meaning anything that\u2019s not nailed down must be converted into cash to pay off its creditors.<\/p>\n

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The store\u2019s closing is viewed as both an injury and an insult to the town. There just isn\u2019t anywhere else to buy a long list of ordinary goods, from dish-towels to tennis balls without a 17-mile journey west, which means an hour behind the wheel coming-and-going, plus whatever time you spend picking stuff up inside. And, of course, many people in town feel that this is just another way of Wall Street saying \u201c\u2026you deplorable, pathetic, tapped-out, drug-addled, tattoo-bedizened yokels are not worthy<\/em> of a K-Mart\u2026.\u201d<\/p>\n

The K-Mart occupied the better part of a small strip mall at the edge of town, which also boasts a Dollar Store, which appears to sell stuff that fell off a truck. There\u2019s another, newer strip mall beyond it with a supermarket, a drug store, and a Tractor Supply outlet that probably stole a lot of K-Mart\u2019s business after opening a few years ago. There\u2019s much speculation about what\u2019ll go into Kmart\u2019s soon-to-be vacant space, about 80,000 square feet of crappy tilt-up construction not far from the end of its design life, with a flat roof that has groaned under heavy snow loads for four decades. Nobody I talked to has a clue.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Farewell to \u201cBargain Shopping\u201d \u201cMay God save the country for it is evident the people will not.\u201d \u2014Millard Fillmore, 13th POTUS, born this day, 1800 France has its Yellow Vests. Here in USA, we have a few poor shlubs hoisting the \u201cGoing Out of Business\u201d signs on the highway in front of the K-Mart. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[23770,14964,195,449,827],"class_list":["post-42411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-business-closures","tag-clusterfuck-nation","tag-debt","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42411"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42411\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42419,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42411\/revisions\/42419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}