The Sacred Store

In the song American Pie, Don McLean sings

I went down to the sacred store where I'd heard the music years before, but...
The man there said the music wouldn't play

Supposedly this is a reference to the olden days when you could go down to the local record store and listen to songs before buying them.  I have to admit that's a little before my time but I do remember that almost every local plaza and strip mall would have a record store.  They would sell you either 45's, a single song from the current music chart for anywhere from 66 cents to $1.  An LP would be more, anywhere from $3 to $4.  You would pay, take them home and play them on your phonograph and dream away along with catchy tunes and poignant lyrics of all your favourite singers and songwriters.

It was a great system for a long time and brought music to everyone.  As technologies improved, CD's slowly replaced LP's and eventually the MP3 replaced the 45 single but something else happened--all the music stores disappeared.  At least Don McLean had a store he could complain about, nowadays, there's almost nowhere to buy a CD.  I know, it's all been taken over by the internet.  Amazon is responsible.  I guess in order to love music now, you must own a computer.  Yes, I fear that's what it has come to.

I guess that's okay, there were some unresolvable problems with the old system.  Even though the product was essentially the same from store to store, the price varied wildly.  It seemed that the more local the store, the more the music cost.  If you really wanted to go on a music buying spree, you'd go to a major retail area where they do a lot of business because they had buying power and were a lot cheaper.  On the other hand, a lot of the specialization is lost.  There used to be a shop in Toronto, Rounder Records, that specialized in music by the Grateful Dead.  I was never that much of a fan but they had every Dead title and prominently displayed their album covers throughout the store.  I'm sure the staff would have been full of stories of concerts they'd attended.  So that's all gone.

And that's still not the end of the story.  After all the record stores disappeared, so did all the bookstores.  Admittedly, there are still a few scattered bookstores but I fear the writing is on the wall for them, they're just about entirely gone with only a few brave faces still messing with retail.  It didn't used to be that way.  Amazon again, I'm sure.

So where is this trend leading to?  Yesterday I got gobsmacked upside the head with the answer.  I went down to the local Quince Orchard plaza to pick up an auto part for the wife's Honda from Advanced Auto Parts.  The Quince Orchard plaza is the local plaza closest to us.  One night, after my wife got mad at me for letting our oldest son ride in the car while sitting in the back window, she stormed out and walked all the way home, so yes, it's fairly close. We used to go down there to visit the comic book store, the drug store, the grocery store and the pet store.  For kids, the local pet store is like the local zoo but even better--if you ask you might even be able to take some of the animals home.  But all those stores are gone.  Not just gone but gone and boarded up, there's nothing to replace them.  The book store that was there had closed years ago.  Admittedly it had always been a bit of a down scale strip mall, but it had its place, it doesn't deserve the awful fate of having half of it stores boarded up.  Bummer, bummer and bummer.

In general 30% of the retail space in malls is going unused, a recent trend.  It's not just the internet, I believe it's also a general consolidation to places like Walmart and the collapsing economy.  Depending on who you ask, America owes somewhere between $16 and 165 trillion dollars we'll never repay and that does take it toll.  There's no question in my mind that America's prosperity is in decline, I'm living through it and I can remember better times.

So, what stores survive in the internet age of a declining economy?  Well, the Quince Orchard plaza still has a barber store and nail salon.  If you can figure out how to deliver those over the internet, you've got a real business opportunity.  There's a couple of restaurants, including an all-you-can eat Cici's pizza.  Popular with the younger crowd.  There's also a laser tag place which is sort of like an older kid's Chuckie Cheese, a favourite place for the preteen birthday party.  Advanced Auto Parts and Staples are sort of specialty stores.  Staples used to be about office supplies but half the store is focused on computers now so in a way it's an internet enabler, and the only gateway to all the outlets that took over for all the stores that closed and you don't see any more.  Also, there's a used bookstore that sells you books from the library when the library doesn't want them any more.  That seemed to have the most foot traffic.

I guess I'm happy that we're transitioning to a more efficient economy.  But still, I mourn for the Quince Orchard plaza.  I spent many pleasant Saturday afternoons there buying crickets for our pet Praying Mantis, treats from the grocery store, dreams from the comic book store and sharing sodas with the kids from the Grog Gourmet.

Lance Armstrong, EPO Enthusiast

There's no question that Lance Armstrong is a great athlete and I was very disappointed to see him stripped of his Tour de France titles.  In his defense, Lance always offers up the fact that he always passed all of his drugs test during his racing career.  And this is true.  Even though the Tour de France officials were very determined to catch him, they never did and he raced for years.  How could this be?  This is a letter of the law versus spirit of the law sort of issue going on.

Every athlete wants to do their best and they have a diet and training regime that they maintain.  At the level Lance Armstrong competed at, there's usually a staff of medical personnel too, keeping their bodies tuned as the mechanics keep their bicycles tuned.  And doctors have a lot of powerful tools to eek out that peek performance, some of them pharmaceutical.  So what guidelines do the physicians follow to make sure they don't take their pharmaceutical solutions too far?  The ones set by the racing commission.  And to that degree, Lance did admirably.

In 2006 Floyd Landis lost his Tour de France victory when a blood test revealed unusually high testosterone.  And the blood test was accurate enough to tell the difference between natural testosterone and the man-made version and there was a lot of the man-made kind in his blood.  This is where it gets tricky.  There's a naturally occurring level of testosterone in all men and if it's too low, there's always HRT, hormone replacement therapy.  Likewise for women and estrogen.  So if it's available, and a racer could benefit from HRT, how far should they go?  That's why there are acceptable thresholds published by the racing commission.

Lance Armstrong always passed his blood tests.  He met the requirements of the racing commission.  A common practice of many aerobic sports is to train at high altitudes and have their bodies adjust to the thinner air.  When they then attend Olympic events at a lower elevation, their blood is oxygen enriched.  Floyd Landis used to sleep every night in a hyperbaric chamber for that reason.Is that an unfair advantage?  No, not defined by the standards that were set.  Likewise, Lance never cheated because he always met the standard.  It's not an easy question, trying to decide between the spirit of the law, the letter of the law and winning the race.  You can only pick two of them.