It seems like a lot of things have closed down recently, of which my local Borders store is just the latest. I can still remember it opening back in 2005 and being thrilled to have a big bookshop - with a coffee shop and stationary section no less! - practically on my doorstep. The closure of this store is just part of a larger collapse of the parent company, so its problems can't be blamed exclusively on my reduced book consumption over the last year or so, but even so I'll be sorry to see it finally go.
This takes place against the background of a general feeling of things running down over the last few months, starting back in October when Yahoo closed its Geocities service (and with it my little website that was being hosted there) and bookended by the sudden disappearance last week of my local Spar shop (source of milk and Saturday newspapers).
Geocities provided free webhosting and I imagine that plain ol' economic arguments probably led Yahoo to pull the plug - but at the same time it seemed a shame that a lot of interesting and often wacky amateur web content was lost along with the service (though at least one of my favourites, a highly idiosyncratic and informative site all about swim caps seems to have been partially captured by the Way Back Machine internet archive).
I'm guessing that economics similarly contributed to the end of my local shops, and while obviously I'll survive their departures, it does feel like my real world - like the web without Geocities - will be ever so slightly little less colourful without them, at least for a little while.
2 comments:
wait, is the spar shop what you called the co-op?
Ah no - thankfully the Co-op is still there. The Spar was a smaller shop about halfway from here to there, which was a bit more convenient for newspapers and milk.
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