Today's bigger shops and malls not really better

The Boston Herald

Take a simple thing like directory assistance: You dial 411, give the name and address of a person whose phone number you want and an operator asks, "Are you sure you're spelling the last name correctly? We show nothing under that spelling." And before you can say, "I'm sure it's correct," there comes a click followed by a recorded recitation of a wrong number, all for the bargain price of 34 cents.

If the recording were a live person, you could interrupt at this point. But since it isn't, since it's theoretically a more efficient way of handling people, you're forced to waste time listening to a wrong number being repeated, then forced to wait for yet a different operator to pick up, in order to explain the situation again.

Before pre-recorded messages, it was a lot simpler. You lifted a receiver, got a human being, told her who you wanted and if she found no listing, she said so. Because you spoke with a person, you murmured "please" and "thank you" and sometimes you said a little more. Always there was some connection, a small meeting, a human touch.

It was this way with everything. Even when people lived in big cities, they lived in small towns, because there used to be a strong sense of community in this country, beginning in the family, extending to the neighborhood, then to church, spilling onto the streets where people worked and shopped and lived.

People knew the names of shopkeepers, and shopkeepers knew your name. They smiled when they saw you; they greeted you when the bell above their door jingled and you walked in. I remember shopping with my mother, walking along the streets of Central Square, stopping at the florist and at the dress shop, and at Woolworths; then taking a bus to Inman Square to buy meat and cheese, getting my grandmother's prescription at the drugstore, then walking up to the S & S for lunch.

"Hi Dot." the men in front of the fire station would shout as we walked by. "Hi, Dot," assorted passersby would always say. "So how's life been treating you?" almost everyone would ask.

I think now how difficult it must have been for her, traipsing from one store to the next, taking public transportation, lugging shopping bags in the cold and the snow and the rain.

And yet I don't remember ever hearing her complain the way I do now when I have to get in my car and drive to the mall. She seemed to enjoy shopping. I know I did. When she would buy flowers, a small bouquet, the florist would wrap them in paper, then pick a rose from a tall barrel, cut off the thorns and hand the rose to me. When she would order a half-pound of yellow American cheese, before the butcher would weigh it and charge her, he would slice me a piece. When she would pick up my grandmother's prescription, the druggist would hand me a lollipop.

Shopping was a weekly holiday, marked by roses and lollipops and smiles. It is so different for me today that it seems like a totally unrelated activity.

Shopping malls were supposed to make our lives easier. Huge grocery stores that carry books and hair dryers and plants and videos as well as every bit of food known to man were designed for our convenience. And now the new slew of wholesale stores discounting books and drugs, electronics and appliances, automatic products and "much more" promise to fulfill our business and home needs.

But what about our human needs? What about our need for personal contact? For people who know our name? For people who remember us?

We have big today, but do we have better? I don't think so. In small towns, up north and in out of the way places, there are still downtowns with small stores in which owners actually work. But mostly there are shopping malls and strip malls and sprawling warehouses employing people who stay at a job a few months and then move on.

All this transience and all this bigness just make us feel smaller, somehow, make us think that we don't matter as individuals, that we're only our Social Security numbers, and license numbers, and Master Card numbers and phone numbers.

The baker used to slip us an extra cookie and so we always came back. The druggist used to ask about my grandmother by name.

At all those warehouse-this and super-that the prices are great. They probably cannot be beaten.

But we have paid dearly for what we save in dollars. We have paid in every "hello" and every "how are you" that we no longer say, and that we no longer hear.