Capitalism

I grew up at the end of an earlier age of American capitalism. My small city on the edge of Boston's northern border had a local economy which was self-contained and very personal. Local banks were owned locally. Local businesses lined a bustling Broadway. Everything from car tires to delicatessen was available in the city center, accessible by local buses, which had recently replaced street cars (trolleys). 

The whole city was just about one square mile in area. The population then was close to 40,000. The trolley to Boston, less than a mile across the Mystic River, had recently been replaced by a bus, which crossed the new highway bridge which had plowed through my city and divided it down the middle. Poor immigrant neighborhoods, abutting busy small-factory district, were easy prey for the brainwashed suburban devotees of the automobile. 

We had no big-box stores. Our largest stores were two competing dime-store chains, tucked in among the smaller stores and movie theater on Broadway. These stores were harbingers of the future of American capitalism. Then they were integrated into my community. Soon they would be succeeded by strip  malls and shopping plazas on small highways farther away from Boston. Our local merchants saw this coming, even then in the late 1950's. Slowly, the lights went out on Broadway. 

The retail experiences of my youth were personal. Benny was our butcher, for example. Each aspect of our retail life was identified by a name. Mr. Baine was the TV guy. The Slotniks sold funeral memorials. Julie (short for Julius) sold tires. Our grocery store was a small IGA, staffed by the same clerks for decades. As I trailed behind my mother or father on household errands, I realized even then that each transaction was accompanied by a social interaction, a short conversation punctuated by local gossip, fueled by our local newspaper, The Chelsea Record. 

I walked by a big-box store in my local Boston shopping center on the evening of Thanksgiving Day. In front of an electronics chain store, men and women were setting up camp for a midnight sale event. It was bitter cold, under freezing with a stiff wind. The desperate bargain-hunters were huddled in sleeping bags on the frosty pavement. Men and women with small children. One man spoke loudly on a cell phone in a language I could not identify. My mind drifted to imagining the life of a retail clerk who had to greet these frozen strangers at midnight, the beginning of tortuous night shift for minimal pay and less personal investment. 

The capitalism of my youth was bridled by a longstanding Puritan ethic (fair competitive price for quality goods or services), melded with  the small-business ethic of an immigrant Jewish community, which had been in the city for fifty years. The quality-assurance of these Jewish businesses was tied to a proprietor's name, like Benny the Butcher. Bad business brought shame on the proprietor within his own social group, as well as lost income. 

Today's mass marketing and retailing is not personal, no matter how hard the huge corporations try to create a personal atmosphere by granting an account on a slick Web site. Walking into a retail store today is a lesson in "Buyer Beware". Disgruntled clerks, whose pay barely pays the rent, must have a special character to deliver any semblance of customer service. Those special few soon move on to better jobs in other fields or climb the goose-stepping corporate escalator. This is an increasingly alienating commerce, which will most likely lead to growing fortunes for UPS and Fedex.

Globalization of this form of capitalism is inevitable in an overcrowded world with mass media which reveal social and economic injustice to the global masses, if corporate capitalism is to avoid violent revolutions against its control of governments worldwide. Whether it succeeds in stabilizing its hold on power is dependent on the development of technology which can make goods cheaper while also making crowd control more effective through propaganda, surveillance and militarism. 

I cherish my memory of local commerce in a small city. I think it helped to shape my self-image as a worthwhile human being in the face of later challenges. Living where people want to know your name from street to store may soon be a privilege of the wealthy in (economically) gated communities, urban or suburban. The rest of us, who appreciate its value,will simply have to try harder to keep that form of civility alive in our neighborhoods and wherever we do business. Modern capitalism finds little profit in civility for the masses.