Vacant Storefronts

In her wonderful book Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, Susan Strasser describes the slow end of the soap peddler, who walked urban neighborhoods with a cart and traded at both ends of the soap-making process: buying household cooking fat, and then selling it back as bars of soap. The horse-drawn soap cart began to fade away after the Civil War.

"Like so many other industries," Strasser wrote,"soapmaking expanded and centralized after the war. Commercial soap production doubled between 1870 and 1890, with fewer companies." Big soap manufacturers bought their fat from meatpackers, not from households. Bulk won.

And so earlier forms of household production were largely replaced by localized commercial production, which was then largely replaced by big industry.

A few months ago, I decided to stop buying books and music from Amazon. I let my Amazon Prime membership die -- without even hearing a whimper from Amazon, which seemed perfectly happy to watch me go. Our local music stores have mostly closed, leaving just one good place that's not very easy to drive to in L.A. traffic. Local bookstores are dyingoff quickly, leaving just one really good one. I decided to spend my money locally, doing my part to keep local stores alive.

So last week I put my daughter in her stroller and walked up the hill with the title of a book I wanted, a fairly recent offering from a midsized university press. I just wanted to get it within a few months. The employees at our great local bookstore looked it up: not possible for them to get. At all. Ever. Their distributor doesn't carry it. So I bought it from my second choice, the press itself. Their web orders are fulfilled by a third party vendor, and are promised to arrive in several weeks.

Amazon could have had it on my doorstep tomorrow morning. For six dollars less.

(Different but related, I just bought a lawnmower online, since the guy at the tiny hardware store in my neighborhood told me the nearest place to buy such an exotic item was many ugly, traffic-clogged miles away.)

The effort to shop locally and support neighborhood business looks to me like an effort to save the neighborhood soap peddler in about 1885. The technologies have shifted; the cultural politics don't matter.

Take a picture of your neighborhood book store, while you still can. And if somebody wants to send me seventy-five bucks for an Amazon Prime membership....