Strong Towns participant Arian Horbovetz decries
The Cost of Convenience. He might be more believable if he didn't signal his virtue so loudly.
With this in mind, let’s be fine with parking a quarter-mile away and getting some exercise on the way to our destination. Let’s pay a little extra to shop at our local market. If we all work a little harder and a little smarter, we can overcome the temptation of convenience culture and reclaim our community strength by doing what is more difficult.
I suppose parking at the perimeter of the Wal-Mart parking lot is selling out.
[I]t’s not just cars. It’s megastores like Walmart that, ironically, we welcome into our rural and suburban worlds on the promise of jobs and inexpensive merchandise—when what we get in reality is a monopolistic machine that pays unlivable wages and makes it impossible for small businesses to compete. The end result is actually a loss of American jobs and a culture that is built around a one-stop-shop solution that is highly subsidized and simultaneously damaging to local economies.
As with anything else, in moderation. We are
all underemployed compared with our ancestors of 1820 (and even 1920) and it's
probably a good thing.
And yet, in a country of perpetual chest-thumping, relentlessly championing the illusion of toughness and grit, we look for the closest parking space at the gym. We curse the driver that takes an extra second to make a left turn, delaying us during our commute. We berate the local business that doesn’t have the “in-and-out” convenience parking we ravenously crave. American “strength” is suddenly brought to its knees when we can’t find a parking space within a few hundred feet from our destination.
Because hectoring and scolding and deplorable-shaming is cathartic in urbanist circles, even if it only elicits an Amen! from the choir.
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