Portland Retailers Blasted?

Jeff Alworth

Counting yesterday, there were three weekend shopping days before Christmas, and yesterday was definitely nuked.  Weather forecasts are grim; the temperature isn't supposed to rise above freezing for another week.  The roads are already a nightmare, and there could be more snow coming--with little chance of melting.  In other words, the weather may well paralyze Portland (other snow-familiar cities less so) between now and Christmas.   Surely this can't be good for local retailers already panicked over steadily falling sales.

It never rains but it snows...

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    More than ever, if you want to help your friends and neighbors, buy from small local businesses this holiday season.

    Ignore the chain stores in the malls, and shop the amazing neighborhood stores instead. In Portland, we have NW 23rd, SE Hawthorne, SE Belmont, NE Alberta, NE Mississippi, Multnomah Village, and more filled with small local businesses working to keep themselves and their employees afloat in this economy. And when it's time to warm up, buy that latte from a local coffee shop, not a chain store.

    Small decisions repeated over time create change. This is a season for me to change my purchasing habits, and make a political point of buying local and supporting small business, so that my dollars directly help my friends and neighbors.

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    You also could also do worse than giving a gift to one of our great local non-profits on behalf of those on your list. Organizations like Our United Villages (that runs The Rebuilding Center), Growing Gardens or The Bus Project are all doing solid work and making a difference in our community.

  • Stacy6 (unverified)
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    Also, please please please check out arts and crafts shows, holiday bazaars, and the Saturday Market. If you look at the bulletin boards around your neighborhood, you're almost certain to find notices of such. The artisans selling their products are as small and local as it gets and we need your patronage to keep going. Thanks!

  • Jeferson Smith (unverified)
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    1) Cheers to Charlie...Donations to local nonprofits can indeed make great gifts. Many nonprofits have trinkets that you can actually put under your tree/ fireplace/ candles/ table/ bed/ arm. WWeek also has goodies for givers to 55 nonprofits: http://giveguide.oaktree.com/Donate.aspx. Each of those nonprofits is also a local jobs driver.

    Get goodies and create jobs: give to nonprofits.

    2) And for our non-non-profit shopping, let's make a big effort to shop with locally owned businesses. New Seasons, Rejuvenation, Powell's, et al., shared a study that local money spent circulates in the local community like a factor of four over non-local businesses.

    Get richer: shop local.

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    It boggles my mind a bit that Portland doesn't have a better snow plan. Their answer to snow? Put chains on your tires. I know it happens infrequently, but that seems like an even better reason to have a superb plan for when it does happen. Why paralyze a whole city?

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    Karol,

    As someone who grew up in the snowbelt, but who also lived in Washington, DC, your frustration with the city is misplaced.

    In snow country, we all had snow tires in winter, we didn't build houses on hills with steep driveways/roads, and the governments had huge fleets of plows and crews to handle the snow. You would not be happy if we purchased and maintained the size of truck fleets and the thousands of tons of salt for the streets that equivalent cities in the Northeast do, because for most years the money would be wasted. Washington DC is also at the same climate level for snow and ice as Portland and the whole metro area there goes into the identical chaos when snow flakes appear that we do for exactly the same reason. Of course one of the primary reasons for the problems is the lack of experience of many of the drivers here who do not know how to drive on snow and ice and help create more problems, independent of the government actions.

    Given the infrequency of snow and ice, typically one or two days a year, we should not invest precious tax dollars in this effort when we can't afford to pay for keeping bridges and roads repaired as is.

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    Portland's "snow plan" is largely based on the fact that it hardly ever snows here. The only real problem with the plan is a shortage of snowplows (I think there are only three). It doesn't make a lot of sense for the City to spend all that money on plows they only use every other year, if that.

  • Family Guy (unverified)
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    Retailers Blasted?

    Capitalism and Corporations are the major problem with America today. We should be celebrating their downfall and defeat. I am pleasantly surprised that retailers are being blasted. I am hoping, meditating and chanting that Obama will tear down these Corps and distribute this money to the PEOPLE! Power to the People.

    Small collectives, growing, sharing and bartering are the long term solutions we need. Mother Earth has been raped by capitalism / consumerism for too long.

  • Evan Smith (unverified)
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    First, being negative doesn't help. Many of your columns are gripes. Let's focus on WHAT WE WANT. Focusing on what we don't want, brings us more of it.

    Second, I live in Bend, and work in Sunriver. I just drove my ancient 1994 Saturn 2WD sedan there on the ice on Saturday, no problem. I drove to the top of Aubrey Butte on the black ice to visit a friend. Again, no problem.

    Chains work better than snow tires. Period. Just go 25mph, and give yourself 4-6x your normal distances for stopping and starting.

    Everybody stay positive, feel good, and forecast those vibes, and we can all make it through this mess, together.

    Come on (normal) Spring! Come on Obama! THERE IS HOPE!

    PS- Buying local really does make sense. Support your local massage therapist!

    Evan Smith, AAS, LMT

  • joshuawelch (unverified)
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    I'm on board with Family Guy. Less consumerism, less environmental destruction. Score one for Mother Earth.

  • Jamie (unverified)
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    I think I know the source of our "chaos" when it snows. It's our frequent inability to simply enjoy life on life's terms. We want to be in control of every aspect of our lives, even when nature gives us a timeout. It just doesn't work.

    I too came from the snow belt (upstate NY), and a foot or two of snow rarely slowed us down; but when we had a REAL blizzard, and ended up with 3 or 4 or more feet of snow (that's when you can't open the door on your house, and to leave you need to jump out a window!), people just accepted the situation and canceled everything. We played scrabble, had cocoa, and watched the icicles get longer and longer. In other words, we relaxed.

    We all would do well to accept the things we cannot change; find the courage to change the things we can; and develop the wisdom to know the difference.

    I didn't make it to work today, but I have a warm beverage and a purring cat on my lap. It doesn't get any better.

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    I'm shopping online for books and gift certificates at Powell's Books:

    http://www.powellsunion.com

    You can click on the blue Powell's logo to have access to search and purchase all of Powell's inventory. And by accessing the store via this employee link, it shows that the workers have the support of the community.

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    Capitalism and Corporations are the major problem with America today.

    Actually, the post isn't about corporations. It's about retailers. In Oregon, particularly Portland, that means lots and lots of home-grown local shops. The national chains will be far less damaged by Portland's deep freeze--they are, ah, national, after all. A whole lot of Oregonians could suffer thanks to the timing of this storm, and dismissing corporations isn't particularly relevant.

    Go buy something hemp. Buy local, support your fellow Oregonians.

    First, being negative doesn't help. Many of your columns are gripes.

    Gripes? The post is a simple observation: the timing of the storm could cost the region millions. Smiling won't change that.

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    I tried to get all my Christmas shopping done before the storm hit. When I saw the weather forecast, I got a ZipCar for a few hours and got as much shopping done as I possibly could.

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    Jamie, I like you answer and I agree.

  • fred (unverified)
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    Family Guy: Capitalism and Corporations are the major problem with America today. We should be celebrating their downfall and defeat. JK: Lets also celebrate those few countries that have successfully driven out the corporations and capitalists:

    Cuba and North Korea.

    Which one would you like to live in? Last I heard they were eating rats in NK, perhaps that is the future you want. Myself, I am quite happy to have the world’s highest standard of living while being exploited.

    Family Guy: Small collectives, growing, sharing and bartering are the long term solutions we need. Mother Earth has been raped by capitalism / consumerism for too long. JK: How do small collectives build light rail vehicles, computer chips, buses and solar panels? Or are you assuming that we will have no mass transit and live like they did in the 1800's?

    Thanks JK

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    FG: "Capitalism and Corporations are the major problem with America today. We should be celebrating their downfall and defeat. I am pleasantly surprised that retailers are being blasted. I am hoping, meditating and chanting that Obama will tear down these Corps and distribute this money to the PEOPLE! Power to the People.

    Small collectives, growing, sharing and bartering are the long term solutions we need. Mother Earth has been raped by capitalism / consumerism for too long."

    I wouldn't mind seeing radical reform in the legal character and forms of corporations, and better more effective ways to force them to pay for the costs they create rather than externalized them on the environmental commons and public commonweal. But a) this event isn't in the long term, it is short term and affects actual people who live in an actual world that actually isn't much like what you idealize, and b) redistribute the money to do what, if you're against consumerism?

    Further, it is far from clear to me that what you propose actually even is possible at current population levels, nor that it is quite as desirable as you suggest even ecologically. If you took the population of metro Portland and spread it around I don't know where you'd want to draw the boundaries with most people doing small-scale agriculture and /or artisan production you're not going to be looking at anything like a pre-capitalist ecological situation. Generally speaking subsistence or near-subsistence agricultural societies have tended to be highly and rigidly hierarchical & undemocratic, with limited division of labor restricting education and the arts, with a lot of vulnerability to hunger, sometimes to the point of starvation, and related high mortality and morbidity rates since hunger reduces resistance to infectious diseases.

    The bubonic plague is 100% natural.

    I'm not sure it's so much about changing consumerism as changing what we value to "consume" -- "services" and activities more than stuff, maybe, certainly changes is methods of production, packaging that's related to marketing rather than health, lots of things that could be worked on. But I'm not really sure I want a less interdependent society.

  • joel dan walls (unverified)
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    Oh good, Kaarlock is back masquerading as "fred". But as for this stuff about snow and shopping, well, Jack Bogdanski is all over this at his blog, with denunciations of the benighted fools who want to encourage people not to buy stuff with excessive packaging, not to mention serial attacks on the folks concerned about the potential for trouble when small kids, school buses, and ice roads conspire. But since Bogdanski has banned me from his site, well, I'm mentioning it here :-)

  • joel dan walls (unverified)
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    Thanks to Chris Lowe for his commentary in this thread. Bubonic plague is 100% natural indeed. The comments from "Family Guy" are reminiscent of the sort of romantic stuff I heard espoused one morning last week on a KBOO call-in show, when the caller and host were reassuring one another that all non-white people are superb stewards of the Earth, unlike those awful white people. I think they would have had a cameo by Jean Jacques Rousseau, but ran out of time.

  • victorthecat (unverified)
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    Great idea Sargent and thank you for the link.

  • fred (unverified)
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    joel dan walls Oh good, Kaarlock is back masquerading as "fred JK: Thanks for welcoming me back. Why do you say "masquerading" when I used my normal JK?

    Thanks JK

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    Posted by: joel dan walls | Dec 15, 2008 5:09:47 PM

    Thanks to Chris Lowe for his commentary in this thread. Bubonic plague is 100% natural

    The plague is, but the battery farm conditions you have to put humans in to get infected with it and the concomitant lifestyle that doesn't pay attention to the environment isn't.

    But it's totally relevant to the discussion. It was after European populations survived the plague that you had a population that could exist in those conditions and the population growth took off. Since there were more people than work, the rise of commodity economies began with tobacco, chocolate, coffee and tea. The surplus population became employed in the procuring, selling and consuming of commodities for its own sake. Interesting that all those commodities stimulate activity (read work) and decrease appetite.

    If you look at British population figures from the 16th century, only about 20% of the new population is engaged in traditional work. The big new class is shopkeepers. The change from everyone having an identity tied to what they do for a local economy morphed into nameless faces filling up cities, trying to overlay their activities onto some kind of framework that would give their lives meaning. The British empire developed to secure the commodity routes, which itself, through wars, gave the surplus population meaning to their existence. But, of course, it's just a circle jerk, and 400 years later you have consumer xmas.

    That's my take.

  • Idler (unverified)
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    The change from everyone having an identity tied to what they do for a local economy morphed into nameless faces filling up cities, trying to overlay their activities onto some kind of framework that would give their lives meaning.

    Another way of putting this is that back in the good old days your occupation totally defined and limited you socially. The assumption is that the toil of peasants is more rewarding than that of industrial workers and that the former are less “faceless.” Thus Zarathustra’s message might be expressed in a paraphrase of Richard II’s message to the revolting peasants of 1381: “Villeins ye aren’t but villeins ye SHOULD be.”

    Personally, I’m don’t prefer a return to serfdom. My sense is that Zarathustra probably wouldn’t change his place with a 14th century peasant either. Factory workers of subsequent times were not necessarily unlinked to their local economy, and at least the industrial revolution led to increased goods and leisure time—through which individuals could increasingly define themselves beyond their jobs.

    Today, a large proportion of the population does participate in the local economy as producers (they always have as consumers) owing to the growth of the service sector.

    Zarathustra’s notion that “the surplus population became employed in the procuring, selling and consuming of commodities for its own sake,” is silly. Commodities are procured and sold for the sake of the procurers and sellers and they are consumed for the sake of the consumers.

    The expression the “surplus population” shares Family Guy’s disgusting misanthropy and deserves the same rebuke given to the protagonist of a famous work of fiction associated with the holiday Jeff Allworth’s post references:

    “If man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered what the surplus is and where it is.”

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    If that isn't the case, why did all the things like tobacco, chocolate, tea and tobacco predate things like sugar and such. I would think your argument would have arbitrary commodities at least equal to or inferior in importance to life sustaining trade. The "corn laws" weren't repealed until the early 19th century. Ergo, the British empire was built on something that was arbitrarily defined.

    Call me a communist, but I would prefer the life of a my 14th century ancestors, except they weren't peasants. They were engineers that worked for a Duke. The period immediately after the plague didn't suffer from either, hence my attribution to social ills to the later population boom.

    I am appreciative to hear a strong counter-reply to something I considered obvious, though!

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    ...disgusting misanthropy...

    Oh, and if thinking that human life is not absolutely sacred, even if it means running every other mammalian species above shrews off the planet, then I plead guilty. It seems that anything less is labeled misanthropy. I might buy that if you could define "human" better than "I know it when I see it".

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    And for all those that say, "who cares about religion, that's only a political reality for a few", "sanctity of human life" is an example of a position where religion influences almost everyone's position on the issue and most people think as rationally about it as the religious right do on "their issues". It is the last great relgious dogma in politics.

  • Idler (unverified)
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    If that isn't the case, why did all the things like tobacco, chocolate, tea and tobacco predate things like sugar and such. I would think your argument would have arbitrary commodities at least equal to or inferior in importance to life sustaining trade.

    I'm not sure what you're asking but it seems you're defending your position (that commodities were traded for their own sake) by drawing a distinction between necessary goods and desirable (or "luxury") goods. That distinction has no relevance for an argument about the claim you made. Demand represents something the consumer wishes to do for his sake, not the commodity's sake. Suppliers trade to make money for their own sake. What could be plainer?

    Did you have some other argument in mind that I may have missed?

    Call me a communist, but I would prefer the life of a my 14th century ancestors, except they weren't peasants. They were engineers that worked for a Duke. The period immediately after the plague didn't suffer from either, hence my attribution to social ills to the later population boom.

    Only a few of your numerous 14th century ancestors would have been engineers. The point I'm making is about the desirability of having your life defined by your job versus the opportunities for self-definition and, indeed, for recreation, provided in an industrial society. I am by no means arguing that the life of a factory worker in the earlier phases of industrialization was preferable to an agricultural or pastoral worker but only that having your life defined by your job isn't such a great thing for most people and that the standard of living has improved tremendously as a result of industrial production.

    "sanctity of human life" is an example of a position where religion influences almost everyone's position on the issue and most people think as rationally about it as the religious right do on "their issues". It is the last great relgious dogma in politics.

    First a comment: religion of one kind or another will always exist. Even when fundamental views spring from a philosophical point of view, if they are adopted en masse, they will have a religious character, with all the attendant moral consequences and irrationality.

    Second, a question: What consequences does the notion that life is not sacred have for laws against murder or attitudes about genocide, not to mention for attitudes about the value of human suffering in general. Honestly, I used the Christmas Carol quote a little archly, expecting you to push back. I was most surprised to see you take an even more explicitly misanthropic position.

  • Zarathustra (unverified)
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    the notion that life is not sacred have...surprised to see you take an even more explicitly misanthropic position.

    It's not that it isn't sacred, it's that it isn't unconditionally the most sacred.

    You make my point though that not being rabidly for human life is defined as being against it. I don't regard it any less than you do, I just regard other things equally high.

  • Idler (unverified)
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    You make my point though that not being rabidly for human life is defined as being against it. I don't regard it any less than you do, I just regard other things equally high.

    <h2>"Rabidly"? I will say that indifference to human life is enough to constitute misanthropy and is the predicate of a great deal of cruelty in the world. Just saying. I'll also note that indifference to others' lives is far more common than indifference to one's own.</h2>

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