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Duncan Crary (as host): You are listening to the KunstlerCast, an audio program about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl. I’m your host, Duncan Crary, and each week I bring you another conversation with James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency.
Today’s topic: drugstores.
Duncan Crary (interview): Jim, welcome to your inaugural episode of the KunstlerCast.
James Howard Kunstler: Nice to be here, Duncan.
Duncan Crary: I understand that you’re recovering from some traumatic oral surgery.
James Howard Kunstler: It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. I had a wisdom tooth extracted about 40 years after it should have come out. You go in there and it’s actually pretty cool. They give you the IV sedative cocktail, which is like drinking about 17 Martinis, and you turn on the iPod and you start listening to UB40 or something. Before you know it, it’s all over and here I am. I’m semi-coherent.
Duncan Crary: So basically, you showed up stoned to your first KunstlerCast.
James Howard Kunstler: I’m about one-third in the bag, but I’m functioning relatively well.
Duncan Crary: Yeah. Our listeners, and that includes me, appreciate that. So, throughout this program series we’re going to be talking about the catastrophe of suburbia, the end of the cheap fuel fiasco…
James Howard Kunstler: Fiesta.
Duncan Crary: …fiesta.
James Howard Kunstler: Although it has produced a fiasco.
Duncan Crary: …and lamebrain architecture among other lamebrain ideas. So, you can’t have this conversation without talking about ubiquitous drugstores and their disposable architecture. I’m showing you this article here — it’s from my local newspaper. I won’t name the drugstore, but fill in the blank. “Said drugstore” is purchasing the last historical building in this suburban town near my city. They’re going to knock it down and they’re going to build a drugstore. However, there happens to be the same identical company drugstore, like, two blocks down the road. So, what’s going? Are they just trying to take over the world? What are these drugstores doing to our environment?
James Howard Kunstler: Well, they’re trying to maximize their operations and along certain economies of scale, which are gigantic, meaning that they try to spread themselves as much as possible and grow incessantly and continually by putting up new ones.
Duncan Crary: They don’t care which ones go out of business. Right? They sort of do battle with their other competitors on every intersection in our town.
James Howard Kunstler: Sure. They don’t even care if their own go out of business in other locations because it’s just a write-off.
Duncan Crary: One of the main problems with these buildings — not only do they occupy really valuable corners of our communities, but they throw up what you’ve call “disposable architecture.” Right? These buildings are meant to last 20 years tops?
James Howard Kunstler: Well. The interesting thing is people are very confused about two different things. One is the programming, which is the drugstore business. But, the other one is the container that the programming is in. You can go to plenty of other places in the world where they have wonderful buildings that contain this programming. It doesn’t bother anybyody, nobody complains. The programming goes in. Before there was a drugstore in that location, there was something else.
Now, because of the sort of throwaway culture we live in, it’s more convenient for these big chains to just tear down what is ever there and put up their own special purpose built box with all of the things in the right place so that the building is sort of pre-programmed. It is a machine for dispensing goods. It’s not even a building, it just happens to come in a form that resembles a building.
Duncan Crary: These companies don’t want to rehab old buildings because they can’t put their aisle of candy bars exactly where they want, to maximize our psychology to buy this crap. Right?
James Howard Kunstler: Yeah, basically, if there’s a wonderful historic building that has 9,000 square feet of space and the drugstore needs 9,402 square feet of space, they’d rather knock down the historic building just to get exactly the right amount of space.
Duncan Crary: Yeah. Actually, there was a case in Albany, N.Y., where a drugstore was purchasing an old school building, and next to the school building was a vacant lot. Rather than rehab the school building and use the vacant lot as a parking lot, they wanted to knock down the school building for their parking lot, build their building in the vacant lot. This is what they do.
I’ve heard you speak to audiences before about the fear of gentrification and also just Mom and Pop stores versus big chain corporations coming to town. You advised the crowd, “Look, don’t try to fight to keep these companies out.” Right? You need to fight to get them to either rehab historic buildings or sometimes better yet just build a building that has some use.
James Howard Kunstler: Actually, the point I was making back then was about 12 degrees off of that. It was really a matter of — we were getting a lot of substantial new downtown infill buildings in Saratoga Springs. A lot of people were complaining that the new tenants were The Gap or Eddie Bauer. What I was saying to them about that was, “Don’t worry about the programming on the first floor. What you got to worry about is the quality of the building.” Because time will go by, the decades will go by, and those chain stores will leave; they won’t be there anymore. Then, something else will be there, possibly even a locally-owned store, because, our economy will be changing.
The national chains will begin to have their problems with their business equations and in particular, operating at the economies of scale that they enjoy. Economies of scale — what it really means is, making an operation so big that you can avoid a lot of redundancies and that you can really pare down your cost. For example, it’s economical for you to ship anything 3000 miles. That will be coming to an end when, by necessity, we’ll have to construct these more local and regional networks of commerce, and things won’t be coming from so far away.
Duncan Crary: It’s seems like they’ve done a pretty good job here in Saratoga Springs, as you mentioned, with insisting that these companies build attractive buildings that respect the streetscape.
James Howard Kunstler: Yes and no. For the most part, yes. The most unsuccessful one in recent years was a drugstore. It was pretty close to the center of downtown. The town officials were insisting that the building be a two-story building, more than a one-story box; and that something else, some other activity, should go on the upper floor. The drugstore chain was just fighting this and fighting this and fighting it for years. You know, they had deep pockets, they had enough lawyers to keep the town officials doing Chinese fire drills until the end of time. So, they didn’t really care how much time this took.
And the outcome of the building was really peculiar. Instead of getting a normal two-story building with the drugstore in the ground floor and offices or something upstairs, they put the drugstore half a story above grade, and then, half a story below grade they put two other retail things, and then, they put a dummy second floor on that doesn’t really have anything in it. It was a completely half-ass building.
Duncan Crary: Yeah, it’s ridiculous. It made your eyesore of the moment I think, a few years ago.
James Howard Kunstler: It was completely inconsistent, really, with the historic pattern. They did manage to build a building that was two stories high, but in the process they did every peculiar thing they could possibly do to make it look abnormal.
Duncan Crary: It seems like they’re trying to do this on purpose.
James Howard Kunstler: The other thing is that the businesses that are located half a story below grade, really aren’t doing that well, because they’re in a dismal place, the stairway leading down to them is always encrusted with ice and people don’t feel safe going down there. For any number of reasons, it was a dumb outcome. And it was interesting to see how the city guys simply could not get these people to do the right thing.
Duncan Crary: Yes, but these companies do not want to be landlords. You look at these supermarkets, these huge one-story buildings. You could put residential space above it, especially in the downtowns, when they build them downtown. They don’t want to be landlords though?
James Howard Kunstler: Nobody does, neither do the municipal people. One of the interesting things, if you go back in history and look at some of the interesting buildings of yesteryear, one in particular that comes to mind is the old Madison Square Garden in New York City, which was essentially a sports venue. But it was built within the confines of a normal city block. The building envelope actually came out to this edge of the sidewalk like a normal Manhattan building. So, you have, basically, a sports arena with stuff on the ground floor and normal retail all along on the outside.
So clearly, the Madison Square Garden company at the time was willing to do this, but they also enjoyed benefits from it. They got a tremendous amount of rents from being there on 8th Avenue — or wherever they were — from businesses wanting to locate there and pay substantial rents for the storefronts.
We could have done the same thing for the City Center in Saratoga Springs. The Pepsi Arena or whatever the heck it is — The Times Union arena, they change the name all the time — in Albany could have been a normal building with some retail around the edge, but that’s just not how we do it anymore. Everything is zoned in a mono-cultural way and there’s no expectation that you’re going to mix anything up.
Duncan Crary: Let’s jump ahead. What’s going to happen to these buildings in the future after the cheap oil fiesta is over?
James Howard Kunstler: First of all, let me state my serene conviction that we are not going to be building that many more of these things. America is so unbelievably over-retailed. We don’t need a single extra silver souvenir spoon shop in this country. We don’t need anything more. But, there’ll be a few twitchings of a few things that were permitted in 2005 and are just now getting into the ground.
So, what is the destiny of these places? As far as I can see, the most likely thing is as salvage, because we’re not going to need that many evangelical roller rinks. They’re not going to really work out that well for homeless shelters, because they’re too far, really, from the centers of town.
Duncan Crary: Really, they’re not design to last very long.
James Howard Kunstler: No, they’re just sort of tilt up buildings that were meant to be there for 25 years, and then, they’re gone. We’re going to be getting far fewer expensive fabricated building materials as the oil age dwindles away. All these things like panelized aluminum, those metal sashes around the windows and the enormous amount of glass and stuff that we use in the quantities that we use them in, and all the synthetic materials made out of petroleum are going to become scarcer and scarcer. We’re going to be reusing a lot of that stuff. So, I think you can expect these stores to be disassembled not too far down the line, and, probably, before the actual end of their design life.
Duncan Crary: OK, so I’m Joe Schmo. I live in town. I’m sick of all these stupid drugstores coming in, what can I do now to stop this so that we aren’t left with this crap?
James Howard Kunstler: As I said, I really think that we’re at the end of meta cycle of the suburban project. We’re going to be building really far fewer additional stuff. We have so much retail, we don’t need any more. The national chains themselves are going to start running into very serious trouble with their business equations, with their huge continental supply lines and getting all their merchandise from 12,000 miles away, and the just-in-time inventory system that depends on the incessant circulation of tractor trailer trucks all around the country. So, the whole system of doing this is going to change.
Duncan Crary: Can I sum it up before the end of our show, just hang tight because these things are on the way out?
James Howard Kunstler: They may be operating for awhile, but we’re not going to be building a whole lot more of them. I think, there will be far fewer battles over that by definition if there are a fewer applications to build new ones.
Duncan Crary: Jim, thanks a lot for talking with me today. You did pretty well for being stoned.
James Howard Kunstler: Thanks a lot, I think, I’ll now just do a head around the floor until someone will scrape me up and put me on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon.
Duncan Crary (as host): You’ve been listening to the KunstlerCast featuring James Howard Kunstler. To leave a listener comment, call toll free at 866-924-9499.
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I’m your host, Duncan Crary. Thanks for listening.
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