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photo: GETTY IMAGES
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'A Nation of Shopkeepers'
By JOSEPH EPSTEIN Within three blocks of my apartment in Evanston, Ill., are 21 restaurants, six coffee shops, five nail salons, four cellphone sellers, three dry cleaners, one multiplex theater—and an utter lack of interesting and useful shops. Sure, we have shops, but they are mostly corporate-owned: Design Within Reach, Joseph A. Bank, North Face. Lacking are the odd shops whose character and contents might pleasantly surprise a passing pedestrian. Evanston used to be teeming with shops, or so I remember from my boyhood. In those days, it was the retailing mecca of Chicago’s North Shore suburbs. Women’s and men’s clothing stores, elegant ceramics shops, and serious jewelers were then in business. But the advent of shopping malls put an end to Evanston’s retail glory days. Slowly the good, useful shops began to fall away. These were replaced by shops catering to students at Northwestern University. Downtown Evanston is Taco Bell country now, land of Starbucks and Burger King and Gap. Did things have to turn out this way? A few miles south of Evanston is a revived Chicago neighborhood called Andersonville, on whose main drag, Clark Street, are a charming hodgepodge of odd shops and non-franchise restaurants. Walking along Clark Street, one never knows what one may find: an excellent independent bookstore, specializing in women’s and children’s books; an unpretentious shoe store with good prices; and an elegant pastry shop, run by a handsome young Italian couple. Tucked into a small space off Clark Street is a hot dog joint, which gets the Chicago hot dog just right; and a thrift store, loaded with surprising items. The element of unpredictability, of delightful surprise, should be part of the adventure of shopping—an element precluded by the standard chain stores that aren’t owned by anyone on the premises. “England is a nation of shopkeepers,” remarked Napoleon, suggesting that the English, as mere shopkeepers, were unfit to fight. Well, we know how the shopkeepers fared at a place called Waterloo. No great surprise, really. Considerable courage and perseverance are required to start and keep a good shop running. This is especially true today, when real estate rental is expensive, taxes on profits high, and the prospect of being clobbered by a national chain store discourages the initiative needed to open a useful shop. Running a good shop is a service to one’s community, of much greater value, in my view, than the work of 200 social workers and more honorable than the efforts of the vast majority of the members of Congress. A nation of shopkeepers, far from being the put-down Napoleon thought, sounds more and more like an ideal to which a healthy country ought to aspire. What’s your opinion? Write to letters.classroom@wsj.com.
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