The restaurant, Malaysian Kopitiam, has been in a nondescript Centreville, Virginia strip mall for eight years. It began life, however, in Washington, D.C. in the late 1990s.

I felt such a feeling of déjà vu going inside. It reminded me in a million subtle ways of the family-owned Italian or Chinese restaurants from when I was kid, which seem to be disappearing.

The pretty but not pretentious plating; the randomness of the humble, unmatched servingware, much of which bears battle scars in the form of chips; the almost stock, almost kitschy interior design and decor; the large portions and extremely reasonable prices; the older couple running the place, greeting you, actually being there at their restaurant; the taste of the wok in the noodles, the obviousness that a single real person just cooked this food.

I remember this place.

There’s a guest book at the front of the restaurant, its first page spanning a few recent years. I flipped to the back to see where it began. 1998. That must have been the very beginning of the Washington, D.C. location. Lots of other people remember it.

We’ve ordered, probably, half the menu by now. Some dishes are better than others, but nothing was bad. Most were delicious. Everything was executed just right, the basic simplicity of many of the dishes elevated by years of experience and refinement and tinkering. I could hardly come up with a complaint, even if I were trying to be a food critic.1

I spent every meal trying to put into words what this place made me feel. Eating here or somewhere like it really feels like…a dinner party? Hospitality? Something ordinary but special in some way which feels squeezed out of our public life? We talk about abundance, inflation, scarcity—somehow, sitting down to a meal here, there is enough, and life is simple.

This is one of those establishments that is not made anymore, at least not here in the D.C. region. So many restaurants are “concepts,” a bit of wise, winking self-awareness. “Nostalgic with a modern twist.” “An elevated take on…” They’re chains, or members of a “restaurant group,” or off-the-shelf franchise concepts.

There’s so much of the same food and the same menu. Korean fried chicken. Sushi. “Asian fusion” (which rarely means more than “mediocre Thai, Chinese, and Japanese dishes on a huge menu”). The “izakayas” all with the same cute hand-drawn menu and wagyu-toro-uni specials. Ninety-second pizza. Fancy burgers (Big Buns, home of “D#*! Good Burgers”).

When you find an establishment that breaks the mold, it is often one that is simply old: which predates the adoption of the current trends, and has continued along on their own path dependency. Some of Malaysian Kopitiam’s appeal is simply that the cuisine it represents is unfamiliar to us.

Its menu might be fairly typical for a Malaysian restaurant. But there is nonetheless something comforting, and something strangely, deeply, achingly familiar about the experience of eating here.

The oyster omelet is just an omelet with oysters. Simple, homemade, no frills. But pretty on a plate, still hot, so perfectly executed it’s the Platonic form of itself.

What the oyster omelet isn’t is topped with gold, or fried in wagyu fat, or made with luxurious West Coast oysters, or duck eggs, or heirloom chicken eggs, or arranged in a flower shape. It isn’t trying to tell you anything. Nothing feels workshopped, engineered, focus-grouped, designed for social media virality.

You don’t realize how overwhelming that aesthetic and approach is until you see it utterly stripped away. The scale and the plainness of the enterprise transcends a mere economic exchange. There is no artifice. You can imagine the owners, who wait some of the tables themselves, saying not “And this is going to be our blah-blah-blah and let me explain…”, but “here, I made this for you.”

The food is what it is, it’s damn good, it’s made by real people, and it’s served by people who know the place and the recipes like the back of their hand. It’s not just a nice restaurant; it’s an entirely different conception of what a restaurant is, a sort of establishment which follows a subtly different evolutionary path. There is a whole understanding of social and economic life here, a whole world which once unselfconsciously was, and perhaps no longer quite is, our own.

In other words, it is a joy to eat here. Culinarily, socially, emotionally. I told my wife, joking, I would cry when they close. Maybe I wasn’t joking.

Of course, on some level I’m just feeling wistful and thinking about the whole familiar-things-fade-away-and-pass-into-history angle. In reality there are hundreds of thousands of restaurants in the United States, somewhere around one third of which are family-owned. I am not witnessing the extinction of a species.

But the species may be endangered. The trends in the restaurant industry and broader economy are arrayed against the simple family-owned establishment, and places like this are mostly not being replaced. Nobody will—nobody can—construct a restaurant today which looks and feels lived in, pleasantly aged.

You cannot buy time, a pedigree, a lineage, a rootedness. Nobody can unselfconsciously replicate yesterday’s unselfconscious expression. It is precisely the things which make a place irreplaceable which cannot be reproduced or engineered on demand.

This is normal, and a sense of loss does not necessarily imply that another outcome was possible. The drift and evolution in menus, concepts, and execution is inexorable. Tastes change. Real-estate markets change. Ingredient prices and availability change. Immigration patterns change.

For all this restaurant’s exceptionalism, at least to me, it is closing. Not selling to a new owner. Not going to the family’s son. There are no doubt specific and valid reasons for that outcome, but it is also of a piece with a general trend.

It is sad, because a whole little body of working knowledge disappears.2 How many restaurateurs and chefs in the United States are interested in learning and mastering a cuisine uncommonly represented in the restaurant world, like a programmer learning COBOL? How many chefs, anyway, could cook a char kway teow so perfectly that one more second in the wok would cross over into burned, 20 or 30 times a night for years? There is an almost impossible complexity in getting a simple a thing just right.

And that guest book, 1998 to 2026? That little story will end in two days.

But there is also something hopeful here. The closure of this restaurant is not due to a bankruptcy or a tragedy; it’s so that a couple who came to the United States in 1986 and has owned six restaurants over the years can retire. It means one immigrant family has climbed the ladder and no longer needs to reach for restaurant as one of the most readily available means of making a living. A restaurant is a business. A means of making money. It has relatively low barriers to entry, especially in a small space in a legacy strip plaza. And a thing like that can serve its purpose.

Alongside changing tastes here in the United States, part of the story of the evolution of cuisines is the trajectory of the immigrant communities who make them, the presence or absence of new immigrants from those places over time, and the economic state of their home countries.

The food is the specific, final step in a complex, global process that can never be brought back when it has changed. The phenomenon of the immigrant-owned restaurant is about these global trends as much as it is about the lives of two real, individual people with their own stories and futures. In many ways, it is not really about the food.

But, of course, it is.

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But there are a couple of kind of interesting things here. First is this Planet Fitness:

Most Planet Fitness locations are in existing buildings or storefronts, as is this one. Strip mall storefronts like this are generally unremarkable. There are a million of them, some brand-centric, some modified, some one-off. But sleuthing and recognition of brand-specific elements can reveal the history of a shopping center like this.

I did not know what this storefront was, and I’m only looking at it now because of this Facebook post I saw the other week:

Now that’s funny. They didn’t even bother to cover up the old Sears exit-signage text, which could just be made out.

This was not a Sears department store, like the huge ones that anchored malls or occasionally stood alone. It was apparently a Sears Hardware, which, like the Sears Outlet stores, sold a reduced selection of Sears products in a strip-mall footprint/format rather than a massive full-line department store. And yes, if you look up “Sears Hardware” store photos, many of them have this exact facade! Here’s one in particular in its Sears days.

You can imagine a world, in fact, where Sears was able to transition into a category-killer, big-box role rather than simply slowly dying off as an outmoded department store. But that didn’t happen.

Also in the strip, in the central space, is this military-only discount department store:

The Google review photos kind of look like a cross between a Kohl’s and a Kmart. This space was previously a Shoppers Food Warehouse supermarket. I think it’s likely that was the original tenant, or at least always a supermarket.

Here’s another old Shoppers, in nearby Chantilly, Virginia. This one was split between an Aldi and a Tile Shop, while the Centreville found an unusual tenant for the full space in that military store.

A gym in an old Sears outlet, and a military-only discount department store in a space vacated by a mostly defunct local supermarket chain. And some Korean restaurants, which reflect Centreville’s status as a Korean-American hub and the region’s junior Koreatown (after Annandale, Virginia).

The coming and going and remaking and reinventing in a space which is itself so drab and ordinary.

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We were chatting about housing and zoning, and I mentioned that one of my particular interests is the subtle way you see business done at a smaller and more informal scale in immigrant communities.

My two favorite examples of this are an old Kmart in Woodbridge, Virginia that’s now home to both a large thrift store and a marketplace of 10 or 15 semi-permanent stalls. They’re home to everything from a grocery store to a clothing store to what looked to me like a tiny defunct video game arcade.

The other is Eden Center, a heavily Vietnamese shopping center in Falls Church, Virginia. There, several old storefronts have been divided into dozens of small shops, very much like an East Asian mini-mall.

The story here isn’t just about immigration. It’s about this question of scale; scale, space, efficiency, hustle. There is a subtle relationship between the physical scale of a space, and the scale at which people can participate in economic life.

This young woman then noted that farmer’s markets—chic, quite possibly overpriced—run on the same basic insight that small spaces and a high density of merchants create more opportunity for the vendors and more potential products for customers. And the high density of vendors is especially important in markets—like the Washington, D.C. metro area—where land is scarce and expensive.

Why, then, is this basic insight, which is to some extent familiar to every American who has ever shopped at a farmer’s market or eaten at a food hall, also so seemingly poorly understood, and rarely capitalized on, in the United States?

The basic logic of density and proximity seems intuitive. She said, growing up in China, that people basically just lived in apartments. They owned them, improved them, raised families in them, hosted gatherings in them. There wasn’t a consciousness of living in an “apartment” as there is in the United States, as though it indicated an inferior status. Apartment life wasn’t something you did for a few years and grew out of, or a stepping stone on the way to your detached house.

She said that, growing up, she never heard the idea expressed that “we don’t have enough room.”

There are a lot of ways you could think about that. People get used to what they’re familiar with, or what they must accept. It wouldn’t matter if anybody wanted more space, because more space wasn’t possible. You could only have one child, anyway, in those days; try raising three kids (and a dog and a cat) in a high-rise with two bedrooms and a kitchen the size of a farmhouse sink.

But these don’t quite hold water; within living memory in the United States, such conditions were something to celebrate. Americans may have been happy to leave cities1, but they ended up in Levittown. They had kids, dogs, cats, hosted holidays, dinner parties, birthday parties.

The original Levittown houses were about 800 square feet. They had two bedrooms. One bathroom.

If something that was once near-universal seems unfathomable to us, perhaps we are the ones missing something. We are missing that relationship between scale, whether commercial or residential, and participation, whether economic or social.

We are much richer now, even if the postwar boom seemed like the top of the world. We are able to buy ourselves more space, more privacy, more distance. In some way, we imagine that we can buy our way out of the constant, quiet, grinding effort that got us here in the first place. We feel that the reward for a rich country is to throw money at the problem of unchosen human contact. We do not have a cultural memory, anymore, of what it took to get here.

“We don’t have enough room” is surely a feeling that people everywhere, of all incomes, have sometimes had. But that Americans experience this feeling almost chronically, despite living in larger houses with smaller families, defies rationality. It is a kind of complacency.

It is curious that we often look back with nostalgia on the times when we had less space and more human contact. College, with its tiny rooms and proximity to so many people and things, seems for so many people a high water mark in their lives.

My father remembers the big holiday gatherings his extended Italian-American family had, in a house not more than 1,000 square feet, with a little formal dining room and one dinky bathroom.

But nobody ever remembers that. Nobody talks 50 years later about how they had to wait five minutes to pee.

They remember crowding around the table, being a backseat chef in the kitchen, running around in the postage-stamp yard (or sending the kids out to run around), getting a drink, staying up late. Trays of lasagna, bowls of antipasto. How did so little make so much?

The price of that joy, in many ways, was the tightness and crowdedness. Of the homes, bursting with energy; of the neighborhoods, not yet so stretched out and separated; of the entire state of regional land use, with suburbs not yet creeping out an hour from the old city.

It is a tragedy that it is so easy to buy our way out of this immediate friction, discomfort, and frustration. It is a stumbling block; it is exceedingly difficult to choose immediate discomfort in the hope of reaping social and emotional dividends in the future.

It should be noted that our separated, distant, centralized, oversized world of sprawl is in its own way frictional and frustrating. There is a cost there, too. Nobody particularly likes the 15-minute drives to buy milk and eggs, the traffic, the traffic lights, the gas prices, the feeling of running around and going nowhere which even the most committed suburbanites occasionally feel, even if perhaps they lack a language to express or even understand exactly what they’re feeling.

But in replicating every element of public life in the suburban home which it is possible to do, and barring every other element of public life behind the automobile, we have made the default American experience one of comfortable, frictionless isolation. It is frictional in logistical terms, but it is frictionless in terms of unchosen social interaction.

This does not mean that suburbanites are quietly desperate drones with no social lives. Much social and public life still exists, but the difference is that in a car-oriented environment, almost all of it must be definitively, affirmatively chosen.

We have not “paid our dues” to crowds and strangers and unchosen exposure. We have not earned the right to buy comfort and privacy at the expense of enterprise. We have not banked enough work and effort and grit and sweat that we can rest on our laurels and have the immense fortune of the American standard of living guaranteed.

Those who know relative poverty can have no such misconceptions. Those who were fortunate enough to grow up with regular, unselfconscious, unchosen human contact—to have a childhood without “we don’t have enough room”—understand, if only as a vague worldview, the strange and necessary confluence between joy and wealth and hard, desperate work.

Those of us who have grown up otherwise have no doubt been spared the frustration of that metaphorical or literal waiting five minutes to pee. At what cost, we can hardly imagine.

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Both locally and nationally, the numbers are sobering: From 2022 to 2025, nationwide homeless PIT [a survey method] counts rose 28 percent to 745,652. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in Los Angeles, where data published in July found that more than 73,000 people are homeless across the county. That amounts to almost 10 percent of all homelessness and 18 percent of unsheltered homeless in the entire United States.

This argues, from a Christian rather than purely technocratic perspective, that housing policy needs to be part of how we think about homelessness:

If your town had an epidemic of swimming accidents, at some point you’d have to stop contenting yourself with pulling people out of the river. You’d need to ask why so many people are falling in.

What does it look like for Christians to think that way about homelessness? I believe it would lead us to a response that has largely been neglected by the church: housing abundance as a way of loving our neighbors.

Housing scarcity is not the only reason people become homeless, but researchers with different ideological backgrounds have consistently found that housing costs are the strongest predictor of homelessness at the regional level, explaining up to 78 percent of the variation between cities.

As far as I can tell, this data is basically correct. Obviously many other issues contribute to homelessness, but housing costs, and the availability or lack thereof of “last-rung” housing for people in insecure positions, is a huge factor in who actually ends up living on the street. Denying this is not about being factually correct, but about trying to preserve the idea that people “deserve” their misfortune.

Importantly, Irwin notes that most of the people who eventually find themselves homeless would not be buying or renting homes at the median market price. Rather, a lot of people remain insecure but not outright homeless, and high housing costs shrink this bottom-level in particular:

Suppose a family who lives in Pico-Union has an uncle who has just lost his job and his housing. If that family already has six people living in a two-bedroom apartment, they almost certainly will not be able to fit the uncle in too. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to be hospitable. It’s just the reality in a housing market as expensive as LA. Housing scarcity has squeezed their capacity for compassion.

In other words, squeezing into a crowded home via a couch or small spare bedroom is not ideal, but it’s not homelessness. The absence of that spare capacity is how a general housing crunch drives actual homelessness.

Those who insist that Christianity not inform public policy—not because they distrust religious influence, but because they believe that Jesus’s words are only for individuals and not for policy or governments—are reading him too narrowly. Irwin says this perfectly, in my view:

Being a good neighbor also means shaping our cities into places where sufficient housing can be built, housing that gives communities room to put radical hospitality into practice. In a very practical way, we can love our neighbors by making it possible for families to turn extra yard space into accessory dwelling units (ADUs)—or for builders to add more “chairs” to the game.

Read the whole thing.

Why a Silver Spring service organization is teaching people to cook, Greater Greater Washington, Carolyn Gallaher, October 8, 2026

This is very nice: an organization that helps people who are homeless get new skills and also a chance to help others and hopefully alter the hopelessness of homelessness:

Cooking is a skill you can use to get a job, but it’s also a path to confidence. That means the course can help participants even if they don’t end up working in food service.

When I visited CSTP’s kitchen, former students emphasized that cooking is something you do for other people. That means it can be a way to reverse roles when you’re homeless, food insecure, or underemployed. While you’re over the stove, you aren’t asking for help, you’re helping others. Eric McCown, one of CSTP’s recent graduates, smiled when he recounted how his mother now asks him to poach her eggs in the morning.

And this is a good example of the kinds of things you might face:

Shepherd’s Table’s found its ghost kitchen in the Silver Spring United Methodist Church (SSUMC) on Georgia Avenue. Chef Gary Bullock, who goes by Chef Gary, teaches the CSTP course and told me he likes SSUM’s kitchen better than the main kitchen at Shepherd’s Table. “It’s much bigger!” he said, and it’s attached to a fellowship hall so students can learn to serve meals for large groups of people. Because the landlord is a church, the rent is also reasonable.

But the kitchen does have a few drawbacks. SSUMC’s kitchen has four ovens, each with multiple burners, but they’re all 50 years old. And, because they’re old stoves, each one has multiple pilot lights, many of which are hard to reach. “You need to be a gymnast to get to some of those pilot lights,” Moore told me. It takes Chef Gary about 15 minutes to get all of them lit.

It’s not like that’s the biggest adversity, but it is a reminder of the way in which little inconveniences can pile up to make life frictional and difficult in a way that is less true of people with more money to throw at little problems.

But really, this sounds like a great program and a genuine service:

If Shepherd’s Table scales up its Beyond the Table program, Chef Gary’s days may get busier, but he’ll be ready to teach more people how to cook, serve others, and help themselves.

Chinese Brands Keep Launching CD Players as Western Brands Run Out of Drives, Thanks to an Unlikely Hardware Fix, Headphonesty, Colin Toh, October 14, 2026

This publication runs some really interesting stuff on the manufacturing/hardware issues in the background with regard to legacy consumer electronics.

This one is about the gradual disappearance of CD-player mechanisms. Of course, these were once so common you’d never even think about the actual drive parts as being scarce or even as anything more than a commodity. But there are fewer and fewer makers of these parts, and that “strands” high-end manufacturers who can no longer make or source parts because the general disc-drive ecosystem has fallen apart.

This has been true of cassette players for 20 or 30 years now, and it’s becoming true of CD players—despite the resurgence in interest in physical media. That resurgence, however, may never be enough to resurrect obsolete manufacturing and supply chains which no longer survive.

A Piece of Thailand in an Inconspicuous Spot, New York Times, Karla Cook, January 13, 2012

This mostly positive review is interesting to me, because I’ve been to this place a couple of times, which is about a five-minute drive from my parents’ house (it’s in the strip plaza with a supermarket where we used to go all the time when I was a kid). It’s a pretty unremarkable Thai restaurant, in my experience. It’s also one of relatively few in the county, which number four or five.

This isn’t really about the restaurant review, as much as it’s about 1) newspaper articles don’t always paint an accurate picture, and 2) even in New Jersey an hour from two major cities, there are places where completely ubiquitous international cuisines are still not quite ubiquitous.

I read, in some 1990s restaurant reviews of Chinese restaurants we used to go to in neighboring Somerset County, that Chinese-Americans were fanning out from the New York City area into central New Jersey. The 1990s seems pretty late for that, but apparently that phenomenon of the dispersal/suburbanization of an immigrant/ethnic community was still ongoing even that recently. I suppose it is ongoing now, for other communities. Interesting stuff.

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, who I follow and whose writing you should check out, offered on social media a list of specific things that might actually become possible if we enacted the zoning, permitting, and other reforms discussed under the “Abundance” umbrella.

Some of her examples drew on Japan, which prompted this response:

Later down in the back-and-forth, this “Garbage Dumpster” fellow added: “As for the small business thing, that’s what I meant by the economic stagnation argument - that’s the enabler of the funky businesses in Japan. You can make a living doing that because rents are dirt cheap and cost of living is stagnant, but that also stifles the overall economy.”

Now an account named Garbage Dumpster, with fewer than 50 followers, might not be an authority on the economics of small businesses, Japan, or anything.

But the questions this raises are interesting. First it brings to mind something I’ve thought before about Japan: it’s a rare developed country which has not undergone modernism, or an Enlightenment, or a Reformation. At least superficially, to an American, Japan looks like an actual example of a “traditionalist” society which is nonetheless modern in most important ways.

That’s to say that at least some of the “quirky tiny business” phenomenon in Japan is likely cultural, or a kind of cultural path dependency following from long-established habits or ideas. But some of it is economic, and some of it is regulatory.

But the argument being presented here is that what fundamentally underlies this climate of widespread microenterprises is not the regulatory regime which makes them legally feasible, but the depressed economy and real-estate market which makes them financially feasible.

He offers Singapore as a counterexample, which has much higher housing costs than Japan. (A quick Google search suggests roughly double, or more). From this, he draws the conclusion that Singapore’s relatively abundance-friendly regulatory regime hasn’t resulted in the same affordability as in Japan, because “abundance” policy has nothing to do with it. Japanese real estate is simply worth less, while Singaporean real estate is worth more.

I don’t think this is correct, but I do find it interesting enough to think through a little bit here, and ask anyone more familiar with Japan’s economic state or business climate to add anything in the comments.

There are a few points I want to draw out here, but the most important one is subtle, and is a pretty important but under-remarked-upon aspect of Japan’s tiny business phenomenon.

Read more

Today’s building is a sort-of strip plaza in Muncie, Indiana, a city of about 65,000 people a little over an hour from Indianapolis. Like a lot of places, there are different economic eras and development styles side by side in Muncie.

There are edge areas like this, where detached houses and big-box stores are literally carved out of farm fields:

And then there’s today’s building, in this older corner of the city’s street grid:

Here’s what it looks like on the ground:

The only thing I’d be able to tell you from looking at it is that it definitely wasn’t built as a strip mall. It looks a little like a giant industrial chicken barn; it reminds me a little of the Big Chicken Barn Books in Ellsworth, Maine:

Shideler writes of the building:

From the Northwest Plaza to the Southway Center and everywhere in between, Muncie is dotted with the usual mix of typical shopping strips and commercial centers. One in particular, though, breaks the mold: White River Plaza. The place stands out not just for its strange design and layout, but for the stories hidden behind its storefronts. Most people probably pass it without a second thought, but the unassuming strip has roots stretching back more than a hundred years! Its past is far more interesting than might be expected.

The site itself goes back well over 100 years, to 1893, when a natural gas boom spurred the construction of a factory on the site. However, that building burned down, and Shideler notes that while the site is now within city limits, at the time it was outside, and there was no fire department to fight the fire.

The current structure is from 1911, where it housed a bed and furniture factory until 1960. Shortly after that, the site first became retail, home to what sounds like a fairly early Walmart/Kmart-type store:

Moore-Hager continued running with fifty employees, at least for a time, but much of the sprawling factory on the old Joseph Bell site was quickly converted into Miracle Mart, a 70,000-square-foot self-service discount department store that opened in the southern two-thirds of the Moore-Hager building on August 16, 1961. With forty-five merchandising departments and a staff of nearly 200 people, the Muncie store joined another outlet in Fort Wayne and several in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

It was home to a succession of local or regional discount department store chains1 before eventually downcycling, or upcycling, into a less corporate and more varied space:

Over the years, White River Plaza has played host to an ever-changing lineup of tenants. Some were national, many were regional, and most were unique to Muncie. For decades, names like Dunham’s, Dollar General, and Amber’s Beauty School anchored the plaza. These days, though, the center has found a new identity as a haven for local businesses. Set foot on the property and you’ll find a mix of hometown favorites: All Star Sports Cards, Bob’s Comic Castle, the Muncie Book Center, Squared Away Foods, Wizard’s Keep Game & Hobby, and RetroJake’s Video Games. Together, they give White River Plaza a distinct personality that feels less like a corporate strip mall and more like a local landmark that, for all its history, still seems very much alive.

I would not have been able to guess any of that.

And go read the whole blog post if this is interesting to you!

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This segment—including Borders, Toys ‘R’ Us, Sports Authority, Buy Buy Baby, Bed Bath & Beyond, Circuit City, and more—has taken a beating in the last couple of decades. Even though they grew alongside the discount department stores, especially Walmart, the rise of Amazon and other e-commerce sites probably took too much market share for so many of these chains to stay in business.

However, as I write, the retail apocalypse has really never quite come for this retail format overall:

The arrival of Doomsday may be slowing—or even reversing. First, it’s notable that despite the carnage in the category-killer segment, many broad product categories do still have at least one category-killer chain representing those products in the physical world, including books (Barnes & Noble), electronics (Best Buy), crafts (Michaels and Hobby Lobby), sporting goods (Dick’s), shoes (Famous Footwear and DSW), office supplies (Staples and Office Depot), and at least a subcategory of home goods (The Container Store).

So, while there may not have been room in a product category for two or three competing chains and Walmart and Amazon, the threat to specialist big-box stores has never quite been extinction-level.

There’s also Lowe’s and Home Depot, which are much larger than other category-killer stores, but function the same way. E-commerce has not yet replaced the ability to run to the home improvement store for a particular screw or nut or bolt or plumbing part, nor has it replaced the importance of being able to inspect things like lawnmowers or barbecue grills in person.

There are even some interesting new ideas going on in the world of category killers. AutoZone in 2014, in the thick of the retail apocalypse, introduced “Mega Hub” stores, which function as stores as well as warehouses to restock smaller typical AutoZone stores. The Mega Hubs are much larger than the typical auto-parts store, up to 50,000 square feet. Here’s one in Austin, Texas, in an old supermarket:

AutoZone has been building more of these lately; recently it was reported that they plan to about double the number of Mega Hubs, which would bring the total number to about 300. This doesn’t seem to have gotten much press outside of retail trade publications, but it’s fascinating. It is probably the most recent category-killer concept and pretty much a new one.

Here’s another interesting idea: DSW (Designer Shoe Warehouse) in 2022 introduced a revamped smaller and more experiential store concept. That’s fairly common, but notice this detail: the smaller store concept has the same amount of inventory!

DSW is reimagining its store design with a new, smaller-size concept that puts the spotlight on its owned brands.

Designer Brands Inc., parent of DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse, unveiled its “warehouse reimagined” store format at Hedwig Village in Houston. At about 15,000 sq. ft., the new format is smaller than a traditional DSW, which averages about 25,000 sq. ft., but offers the same amount of inventory due to design optimization.

There’s also the concept of “stores within stores,” which can be gimmicky or might be a genuinely good idea.

I saw this post at the Facebook page Retail Dead or Alive, bouncing off the recent Party-City-inside-Staples arrangement:

In addition to that deal, there is the new “Bed Bath and Beyond inside The Container Store” concept being rolled out now. Like the smaller DSW with the same inventory, it’s likely that a little bit of squeezing can fit these stores-within-stores without the primary store losing SKUs.

This is all very interesting because it means there are still new ideas in brick-and-mortar retail. The narrative that e-commerce would eat physical stores was not entirely wrong, but it was quite exaggerated.

Now here’s a little bit of retail history. In some ways the trajectory of the category-killer idea is even shorter than you might think. Discount and warehouse-type stores have existed in some form since at least the early postwar years, and Toys ‘R’ Us stands out as an early category-killer-type store. But the world of curated, broadly specialized 25,000-40,000 square foot superstore, with one or two or even three chains for every broad category, is a child of the 1980s.

And even in the mid-1990s, the idea of category-specific superstores was novel enough for the New York Times to publish an article on their appearance along a major New Jersey commercial corridor:

Along six major highways in the northern half of the state, retailers are moving in and getting bigger. “For Lease” signs in front of vacant stores have been replaced by signs that say “Opening Soon” on hangar-sized buildings.

Retail vacancies fell to 3.2 percent in 1995 from 5.3 percent the previous year, according to a recent survey conducted by R.J. Brunelli and Company, a retail leasing firm in Old Bridge.

Many analysts agree that the retail sector has rebounded somewhat after several years of sluggishness. But they point out that shoppers’ appetite for bargains has favored the proliferation of “big boxes,” giant stores of more than 15,000 square feet with no frills and discount prices….

On Route 22 between Union and Somerville, Tops Appliance City, Sneaker Stadium, Staples and Pet Food Giant are the newest tenants.

This is good news for shoppers who like one-stop bargain shopping and don’t miss the personal service that shops in small downtown areas often provide.

That is pretty wild to me, that “shoppers who like one-stop bargain shopping and don’t miss the personal service that shops in small downtown areas often provide” was not kind of an obsolete or old-hat idea in 1995. The end of the category killer’s big burst of expansion very nearly overlapped with the beginning of its demise.

Check out the piece over at The Freeman!

Related Reading:

The First Of Toys ‘R’ Us

Vornado’s Long Life

A Bit of Super History

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One of my favorite things to do is drive—yeah, I’m sorry—down my region’s older highways and just observe them. Semi-aimlessly meandering and seeing what I see, alone in my car, is a flow state for me.

The immigrant communities, the old buildings, the subtly earlier iterations of familiar roadside fare, like shopping centers with smaller anchor stores, situated closer to the road, or gas station buildings with exterior-entry restrooms.

It’s impossible to predict how much one of these drives will yield. Maybe I’ll see a Latino man with a machete slinging coconuts out of a pickup truck parked in a strip plaza, and that will fill out an example in an article about small business. Maybe it will become the central image for an article I can eventually sell to a magazine. Maybe I’ll try a new food item at a local restaurant and use it as a fun little “local color” detail, and receive an interesting or useful comment from someone who works in a restaurant or does business in that community. Maybe I’ll see a funny sign and make a joke to myself and say “That would make a great headline!”

It’s almost like I have a collection in my mind of little vignettes and details and one-liners I pick up from everywhere and store away to use here and there, who knows where.

Or maybe, as sometimes happens, I don’t really find much, and the handful of stops I pre-planned will be a bust, and yield nothing useful for an article unless I want to just pretend.

It’s almost like fishing—you’ll only “catch” so many worthwhile experiences or details out of all the “casts” you make, but the boredom and repetition and frustration are inherently part of the overall process.

However, I go back and forth on this. Part of it is that I’m good at arguing, and so I can almost convince myself of anything. I can argue, you know:

“These little road trips are a drive through America’s history, but also its future. It’s exactly the suburban places that have been used and left behind where the most interesting things are happening. Immigration is enlivening them. You can see a scrappy entrepreneurial spirit in these places that comfortable, affluent Americans seem in some way to have outgrown. Come drive with me.”

Then I can also say, “How many times do you need to write some little blurb about hardworking immigrants in rundown commercial strips? And anyway, it’s a waste of time and gas. Why do you need to spend half a day on the road and go spend money at some random restaurant so you can write the same thing again with a few different pictures that all look the same anyway?”

Obviously, I know which one I really believe, or I wouldn’t be writing this newsletter. But I do sometimes doubt the value-add of actually doing the half-day on the road as opposed to exploring on Google Maps from my own home. How different is the final series of observations? I do think the “doing” is part of the point of the work, which is why I don’t like to outsource it to Google Maps, at least not completely (or AI).

I’d say that Google Street View doesn’t capture

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Personal essays can feel cheap, attention-seeking, embellished, dramatic, too particula…

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A century ago, about 250 people lived on Hog Island, a seven-mile expanse off the Virginia coast. They raised livestock and gathered oysters. They lived in a town called Broadwater, worked at the lighthouse and Coast Guard station, and danced at ni…

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My argument in that piece would be familiar to anyone in housing advocacy: NIMBYs are wrong that a community can be “done” or “full.” Change is part of life—especially in a community near a major national and global city. Protecting a suburban lifestyle as it was established decades ago, at the expense of both dynamism and affordability, just doesn’t work in a region like the D.C. area, or other major hotspots for the YIMBY movement.

I argue, further, that we need to explicitly draw out a metaphysics of cities and housing advocacy:

There is no “real” place in the ether, some Platonic form of it, from which the actually existing place on the ground is illegitimately diverging. There is no correct or final end state. Human settlements change every bit as much as humans do.

This is not a negation of community or local character; it is a more expansive understanding of community and local character. A place is what it is—and what it was, and what it will be. We are all, all the time, part of it. We are building it together. This is the philosophy that underlies urbanism and housing advocacy.

The comment I received was interesting, because while what the commenter writes is obvious on one level, I can’t say I’ve ever really considered it explicitly, or heard it discussed this way:

It is quite understandable that people are surprised by this sort of change. This generation is the first in a century that experiences land scarcity. Previously we got trams and trains, and then cars. Nobody needed to redevelop anything1 since there were always huge tracts of greenfield land available. There was no building up. There was drive ’til you qualify. But now this expansion has run its course and no new transport revolution has shown up to continue it.

That is so interesting. The argument here isn’t that suburbia is a product that was built, is finished, and ever shall be, amen. Or an argument against city life or density or multifamily homes. It isn’t an argument against anything.

It’s an observation that

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This is an interesting piece—pair with the second piece below—because there’s a bit of a divide among urbanists over remote work. Some see it as a way to enliven the places people actually live in, i.e. suburbia, and maybe also orient cities likewise around residents over commuters.

Others argue that the …

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But we’re looking at this building in particular:

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It’s a bit uncanny on the ground, too. On the way to our happy hour venue, I felt like I was trespassing a bit, almost like walking p…

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If you’ve been to a Barnes & Noble recently, you’ve certainly noticed that it isn’t just a place to buy books anymore — nor has it been since 2019 when the company started focusing on curated experiences. There are Starbucks cafés mixed with reading …

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But on the other hand, does anybody love decluttering?

I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been doing a lot of organizing in our house lately. And it’s striking how much of the stuff I own isn’t stuff I particularly like, or even want to keep. Some of it is, of course. But a lot of it is just…there. Sure, there’s a reason for all of it, but the reasons often amount to little more than “It’s easier to just keep it.”

And it is easy to keep it. Over the years, as I’ve gotten more space and accumulated more stuff, I’ve also gotten more attached to stuff. More likely to view it as having some meaning or symbolic significance. I think of this as “sacramentalism”: old things contain memories, and keeping them around allows you to access those memories, or even, in some way, to make them present. Silly, spooky, all too easy a response to that nagging feeling that I should declutter a bit.

I can remember a time when I didn’t feel this way about (most) stuff, and when decluttering, if I had to do it at all, wasn’t a mental and emotional marathon. That time was college.

If you think about it, college life is actually a fairly good approximation of “you will own nothing and be happy,” shorn of the negative political implications. And curiously enough, we tend to be pretty happy during those years. Correlation is not causation, but it’s not nothing. In college, you really do own a lot less, and you probably are fairly happy.

Caveats, of course: a lot of “your” stuff is at your parents’ house, so the contents of your tiny dorm room are not your entire set of possessions. If you’re on a dining plan, you need little or no cooking and home equipment. The bed and the desk and the dresser come with the room and belong to the college, so you don’t need to buy or own any major furniture.

Nonetheless, you really do own less stuff—and not for any ideological reason, or even really intentionally, but simply because you need less, and you have room for less. Nobody is telling you that you can’t own things. A lot of college students are free for the first time to just go shopping without having to clutter their parents’ house.

But you have tightly limited space, and you move every year. The enthusiasm and the momentum overwhelm the habit and the inertia. You don’t have time to get attached to things. You don’t imbue them with years of memories.

You run to Target with your friend who has a car and get some new organizing crates, then you get tired of them, give them to a friend, and get something else.

You buy a bunch of cool stuff during move-in week and then realize you’ll never actually play board games or raise a goldfish, and you never think about it again.

You’re throwing a party in your room and some idiot friend of a friend knocks over your fridge or TV and breaks it? You don’t get too upset about it; you go home the next weekend and cajole your parents into buying you a new one. Or maybe you trashpick one from a rich, spoiled student.

There’s still buying—though still much less than a suburban homeowner—but there’s absolutely much less accumulating. Stuff comes and goes and doesn’t mean much. This disposability ethic is often viewed as an unhealthy, consumeristic, throwaway attitude. I think in some ways it is a healthy attitude: one which doesn’t elevate consumer products to some kind of mystical level, and doesn’t turn them into talismans or memory vessels.

Of course age and stage of life, income (lack thereof), and the general coming-and-going nature of college life are variables here. But the point is that there is an interplay between culture and psychology and spending and accumulating and raw physical possibility.

Stuff, and the accumulation of stuff, simply can’t play such a large role in your life when logistics and space limit its usefulness. College is, but isn’t only, a different life stage. It’s an environment with built-in logistical friction against owning and keeping a lot of stuff.

That environment does a great deal of the work of buying and keeping only what you need for you. And the simplicity and lack of attachment that environment facilitates can be liberating.

It is also

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Here, on U.S. 22 in Union, New Jersey, is a Jollibee (a Filipino fast-food chain), in the space of a former Boston Market:

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This is great, and this is what I mean when I write about seeing ordinary objects in a “sacramental” manner. This piece is not about stuff, though, but about the built environment writ large:

Catholicism made the invisible visible. Love, fear, suffering, death, hope,…

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One of the things you’ll see pretty often in comments and discussions, on these retro tech pages and the like, is people pretty harshly putting down questions they perceive as low effort, or coming from “resellers” or “scalpers,” instead of real hobbyists.

I saw one post in a vintage computer group where a young guy had bought a 1980s or early 1990s IBM PC clone. He was asking what it was and what it might be worth, and described it as “not having any ports” (or something to that effect). The comments were overwhelmingly to the effect of, you ignorant young’un, that’s a PC, you don’t even know what those ports on it are!

I guess there are two ways of interpreting what’s happening here, and in many other similar exchanges: one is that a bunch of people who know the answer, and whom it would cost nothing to give the answer, instead withhold it and make fun of the guy who doesn’t know yet.

It’s like a non-politics version of that annoying “I’m offended by your comment, but I’m not going to explain to you why, you have to do the work” thing. In other words, it’s just a variety of gatekeeping, taunting someone with your knowledge without sharing it, because the hazing is the point. Nobody ever told me everything, why should anybody tell you everything? Do the work.

But of course there is another way to look at it, which is probably how the people answering a little rudely are actually seeing it. It’s more like, this young whippersnapper who can’t even recognize a computer from a few years before he was born is trying to mooch off of experienced people who know and like this stuff, probably just to flip it for a quick buck. Why should we help him out?1 You could put it this way: if he’s trying to just sell the thing, he can look it up himself. If he’s trying to get into retro computing as a hobby, he should know he actually has a computer!

There’s another one of this genre of exchange I remember, from a tube television enthusiast group.2 The question was from a guy doing an estate sale or a house cleanout or something, and he came across a pretty nice old tube TV in the house; the gist of the post was that he was asking the tube TV enthusiasts how they would price it for reference.

People kind of

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