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11.01.2002

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This issue of HartBeat is excerpted from a recent N|sight Magazine, The Hartman Group's bi-annual publication exploring the dynamics of the health and wellness arena.

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Mom & Pop: What's In A Memory?

As anthropologists will tell us, a given society's myths and mythos often arise to address certain structural tensions simmering underneath our social fabric. Viewed in this light, our current preoccupation with mythical narratives surrounding the "mom and pop" store of years past begins to make a lot more sense. For when we are listening to our peers, friends or relatives bemoan the passing of the mom-and-pop stores - waxing nostalgically about "the way life used to be, back in the good old days" - what we're really doing is assuaging ourselves of an acute, unexpressed ambivalence in our society regarding the nature of commerce and social relations.

On the one hand, Americans, more than any other of the world's cultures, pride themselves on economizing in the marketplace. Economy is a, if not the, moral virtue in our society. Yet at the same time, we're also sort of aware that these bargains, these marvels of economic efficiency, come at a cost. Namely the cold, depersonalized, less family-oriented existence we find in the marketplace. As one version of this common refrain goes:

All around us, the small mom-and-pop stores have been replaced by faceless chain companies that care more about profits than people and families.

So as a way of alleviating these tensions - between the overriding urge to economize and the desire to connect with our fellow citizens - we imbed in our mythos and memories specific visions and notions of an idealized life that eventually replace the actual pragmatic details of what happened in the past. Never mind that it must have been pretty boring to always visit the same small, "mom and pop" retail outlet. Never mind the consumer frustration that surely must have arisen from limited inventories, slow shipment schedules and expensive transportation costs. Instead, we're left with fond recollections like the following:

Compared to the corporate giants that now flood our neighborhoods, grocery stores back then were small mom-and-pop establishments named for the owners or the area in which they were located. Everybody always knew everybody else, and they were great places to socialize. Those stores are treasured parts of my childhood memories...the sort of memories where everything and everyone was always happy.

Of course the point here is not to adjudicate between competing explanations of the past or get hung up on whether one version of the past is somehow "more right." Rather, our goal is to understand that there is a certain logic ordering our narratives and that logic emanates directly from the assorted anxieties, tensions and frictions that undergird social life.

Turning to our larger analysis here, what we find, then, is a certain mythos driven, in part, by the (admittedly unintended) consequences of success of early supermarkets. As supermarkets emerged in the retailing landscape of mid-20th Century America - replete with their extended product selections and bargain basement prices - they essentially drove local grocery retailers (mom and pop's) toward a merely viable status (i.e., functional utility) and beyond, in many cases threatening their very livelihood. Without overstating this case, we can start to see how large grocery retailers were creating new problems as they were busy solving old ones.

As suggested in the main text, this dialectic - this tension between success in the marketplace and the mythos resulting from such success - has created a world wherein a specific dimension of "memorableness" (i.e., creating a distinctive retail experience), is increasingly construed as having to do with all things nostalgic. As we have all surely witnessed over the past few years, the result is a proliferation of often, though not exclusively, small producers and retailers attempting to capture memorable status with assorted claims to all things "small and old-fashioned." To this end, authenticity, traditionalism, regionalism and localism are "in," while homogenization, depersonalization and utilitarianism are "out."

The central question is, thus, can this dimension of memorableness be successfully channeled by anything other than a single, localized "down home and personal style" retailer? If so, how does one go about this work?

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