Forbidden feet.

Travel any reasonable distance in this country, across multiple political boundaries, and you will inevitably discover a variety practices in handling traffic.  We see it everywhere: speed limit differences, right turns on red (or not), the size and generosity of the turn radius at an intersection, the style and design (or even the very existence) of pedestrian amenities. Though it may be a bit hyperbolic to assert that these idiosyncratic distinctions arise from the constituents applying representative democracy to get the system they desire (within the bounds of federally mandated core standards, that is), it isn’t far from the truth either.  Some states have developed their own characteristic strategies: the Michigan Left that I wrote about a few months ago has earned its significant detractors, but enough traffic engineers recognize its merits that other states have started adopting it.  (They still call it a Michigan Left.)  And everyone on the East Coast knows New Jersey’s penchant for the jughandle style of “left” turns, which also has apparently generated enough backlash to prompt injunctive legislation.

But one state has managed to surprise me with its dogged tendency to feature a particular sign—something I have only seen on extremely rare occasions elsewhere, but in this state the sign is commonplace.

Even amidst the dusky, grainy quality of the photo, it is obvious what this sign is trying to convey: no pedestrians allowed here.  Granted, it’s not an area that most would consider a pedestrian paradise: a post-war suburb to a large metropolitan area, in which big-box chains, strip malls, and sizable parking lots flank both sides of a six-lane highway.  Again, the twilight haze might obscure the clarity of the photo, but not enough to point out the obvious.

These signs are not along a limit access highway, an environment that disallows pedestrians through the vast majority of the country.  No, this is an area with plenty of stop lights, curb cuts, and choke points for vehicular traffic.  It’s not an attractive, desirable, or particularly safe area for walkers, but must they be forbidden?  Is it perhaps an isolated instance—a particularly hazardous location in which the sign emerges out of a genuine public interest to inhibit those without motors?

No, these signs are everywhere.  Here’s another intersection a half mile down the road.

Granted, it’s probably a horrible intersection to traverse by foot.  But to forbid it altogether?  Where is this?!  The lighter sky helps clarify, while the concrete “Jersey barrier” separating the directions of traffic flow might offer a hint as to what state this is.  But no, this isn’t New Jersey.

It’s a larger and even more populous state: the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.  I’m not as well-traveled as some people out there, particularly when it comes to the western half of the US, but I have still never seen a state where “no pedestrian” signs are as prolific.  I frankly can’t recall seeing them anywhere in most states except along expressways.  But they’re just a part of the roadside landscape in PA—in exurbs, rural areas, or major suburban thoroughfares like this one.

I’d be shocked if local police enforce this regulation outside of places where pedestrians typically are forbidden—i.e., legitimate limited access highways.  While it is unfair to form flattering or degrading inferences about an entire state from something as petty as a roadside sign, it’s hard not to wonder what elicited this sign in a state like Pennsylvania, where the settlements, the housing stock, and the roads largely existed before the automobile.  To this day, most Pennsylvania cities and towns—particularly those in the eastern half of the state, where this photo comes from—stand upon a tightly wrought grid with narrow streets, tiny parcels, small setbacks from the sidewalks and an overwhelmingly walkable character.  The interstices between towns might be filled with conventional suburbanization, but the old towns remain quite compact.  This pattern contrasts sharply with a state such as Nevada, where virtually all inhabited areas owe their layout to the ubiquity of the car.  Since around 1970, Pennsylvania has also remained one of the slowest-growing states in the country; population growth in the 2000s was less than 5%.  Thus, Pennsylvania can claim many more intact pre-automobile communities than most states.  And its largest cities, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, have public transportation systems that, at least by American standards, are fairly robust.

The Keystone State should boast better-than-average pedestrianism, and—for the most part—it probably does.  But somehow, among its successive legislatures, this red, white and black sign slipped into the inventory for various municipal traffic engineers, and in quite a few places they have deployed it with abandon.  My hope for those Pennsylvanians who lack the option or ability to drive is that all police offers turn a blind eye to this regulation.  While the photos above don’t depict a particularly walkable environment (sidewalks are sparse), how is anyone supposed to respond to a scene like this?

The municipality’s public works department has paved along the sidewalk easement, but then it restricts people from walking through the installation of this sign.  It might not yet be dusk, but it’s close enough to the twilight zone.

When the best preservation efforts go up in smoke.

My latest is up at Urban Indy.  It focuses on a charming Victorian double in the historic neighborhood of St. Joseph, immediately north of downtown Indianapolis, perfectly visible in this Google Streetview image.

At least, that's how it looked in the summer of 2009.  This is what it looks like now:

It's gone.  Demolished.  One could argue that protections for "contributing buildings" in Historic Districts don't give enough teeth to enforce demolition, but that wasn't the problem here.  In the spring of 2010, the building burned to the ground--a fire of undetermined origin.

My research, revealed in full at Urban Indy, determined that it was not a suspicious fire by a landowner who wanted to rid himself of the structural albatross in order to offer the adjacent apartment buildings some quick-and-easy off-street parking.  I actually spoke with the owner of this tragically destroyed home, who made every attempt to save it.  The actual narrative, and the parcel's uncertain future, get full exploration, in an attempt to reconcile the need to preserve the "character" of a historic district (always a fuzzy word) with the understandable aspiration to maximize the marketability of a small, constrained piece of land.  Comments and further observations are strongly encouraged--residents of the St. Joseph neighborhood would certainly appreciate what outsiders might have to say!

Urban recycling: not a bad (unironic) beer in the box.

-->A recycling station housed in an old factory building might not seem like a novel concept, particularly in a city with a plethora of underutilized or vacant industrial space.  Like Detroit.

And even the appearance of it—a pastiche of industrial chic, street artistry, found objects, and, yes, even a pretty extensive panoply of bins of reusable materials, all monitored by reliably bearded and tattooed staffers—is probably closer to the mental image of what community recycling could, or should, look like.  “Taking out the trash” isn’t just utilitarian and mundane; it’s fashionable, eye-catching and even sorta fun.

Despite my evocation of hipster clichés, Recycle Here! feels like a novelty, at least in part because it’s among the few ways that residents of the Detroit can divert their discarded objects from landfills.  Long notorious as the largest city in the country without a municipal recycling system (both elective and compulsory), Detroit has also striven to find creative ways to curtail the illegal dumping that took place on its copious vacant lots—much of it recyclable material. A group of Wayne State University students founded Recycle Here! in 2005 as a response to the obvious dearth of options serving Midtown, then as today an emerging neighborhood with visible signs of homespun reinvestment.

As smart as the initiative was, it couldn’t easily both fund itself and support a demand that clearly stretched well beyond Midtown.  By 2007, the Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Program (GDRPP) began funding Recycle Here! as the City’s de facto recycling center, all while expanding its outreach by offering additional drop-off days, a broader array of recyclable materials, and satellite locations elsewhere in the city.  In addition, the partnership has allowed curbside recycling pilot programs in three neighborhoods: Rosedale Park, East English Village and Palmer Woods/University District—with intention to grow throughout the city in the long-term.  The Michigan Municipal League website points out some of the other accomplishments: a growth of over 50% each year since opening; a non-profit spin-off called Green Living Science that has educated Detroit Public Schools on recycling initiatives; a for-profit arm called GreenSafe that sells recycled products to major consumption events, like Detroit Lions games. 

Even if it’s essentially an arm of city government, the Recycle Here! facility never for a moment feels like one.  The loudspeakers churn out tunes from a diverse array of genres, no doubt reflective of the eclectic taste of whoever is in charge at that moment.  On the busiest days of operation (typically Saturdays), a local vendor offers cheap French press coffee, and various food trucks tote their comestibles in the outside parking lot.  Another staffer sells screen printed t-shirts, virtually all of them featuring the ingenious and ubiquitous Recycle Here! bumblebee logo, designed by local artist Carl Oxley III:

And the bumblebee receives its share of competition from the other sculptures and murals that form a consistent backdrop to the more utilitarian goings-on up front:

If it isn’t already obvious, Recycle Here! has achieved what it ostensibly needed to do in order to ensure survivability: it evolved into a smartly-branded community gathering place.  And it’s a good thing it works so well: the process of recycling here is far from hassle-free.

Yes, the bins separate Styrofoam peanuts from other types of Styrofoam.  Visitors also have to hold all their plastics up to the light to see if the etching indicates a #1 or #2 (one bin) or #3 through #7 (a separate series of bins).  And cardboard gets separated from office paper, which in turn has a separate bin from newspaper, as well as glossy paper.

And less common materials need separating too.

Clear glass could contain a lot of items: salad dressings, pasta sauce, artichoke hearts, pickled pigs’ lips.  But colored glass usually captures a discrete family of consumable products.

Booze.  These days, varietals of wine do not delineate social strata that easily; even a few highbrow wines might reach the dinner table in a cardboard box.  But it’s very easily to distinguish consumers by the type of beer they drink.  And the beer bottles at Recycle Here! overwhelmingly fit a certain category: the non-corporate.

Whether it’s a microbrew from the Upper Peninsula or a Singaporean IPA, the beers being recycled here are the opposite of what about 85% of America drinks.  No watered-down Coors, Michelob, Budweiser.  The only beers found in the bins that would pass as mainstream working-class Americana are Pabst Blue Ribbon or this Miller High Life, like the one strangely perched, unopened, on the rim of the Clear Glass bin.

In other words, hipster beers.

Probably I’m going out on a limb by making inferences about cultures by the type of beers they consume, but not really, or at least not enough.  I don’t think we witness a dearth of Budweiser bottles because Detroiters simply don’t drink cheap beer.  I think the beers we see in these bins broadly reflects the ethos of people who go out of their way to recycle, and in Detroit, “going out of the way is” precisely what most people have to do.  In short, the act of recycling not only requires the active involvement of driving to the facility (at least for everyone outside those three affluent pilot neighborhoods), it also requires extensive separation once you get there.  If you have two boxes to deposit, it could take you over an hour to get it all done.   The staff at Recycle Here! makes the compelling argument that their approach not only ensures more material gets successfully recycled than if it all gets lumped together, but it also encourages the population to become more invested in the process.  While this may be true, it almost undoubtedly also scares off a huge contingent who simply doesn’t want to be bothered.

Thus, Recycle Here! succeeds because there are enough Detroiters, favorably disposed toward urban living, educated enough to have some disposable income, and predominantly left-of-center, all of whom at least value the idea of sustainability in its various incarnations: locally sourced food, fair trade or free-range growing practices, and non-corporate brews with higher alcohol content (and higher prices).  It fits like a hand in glove, and the fact that quality French press coffee gets served on Saturdays makes as much sense as the absence of a vendor selling McDonald’s, no matter how much Mickey Dee’s coffee has improved in recent years.  Through Recycle Here! and the pilot programs in those selective, higher-income, stable neighborhoods, the Greater Detroit Resource Recovery Program has found the right niche to plant a seed.  It offers a confident start to set the trajectory for a city-wide recycling system.

Now if only they could figure out where all those bottles of Bud Lite are going.

Who initiated the scrawled controversy? We know (k)nothing.

In a city as replete with illicitly painted buildings as Detroit, it isn’t hard to find graffiti in which the subject matter both polarizes and fully illustrates the ongoing debate between two parties.  In some parts of the country, these polemics rarely stray outside of the stalls of men’s restrooms.  They’re low-key and almost private.  But in Detroit, the debates can take place in the great wide open, on the walls of buildings, lampposts, trashcans, or even the side of a water tower, as I noted a few months ago when I witnessed how one artist transformed the raised fist of solidarity into the heavy metal “sign of the horn”, thereby deflating its potentially incendiary political implications.

But you don’t always have to look at the horizon line for inspiration.

The Addison Building on Woodward Avenue, originally designed by “the architect of Detroit” Albert Kahn around 1905 and restored as market-rate apartments, offers an interesting point-counterpoint at the storefront level.

Scrawled in what appears to be a thick Sharpie is some artless text in all caps:

It says—or at least appears to say—“VOTE NOPE”, which doesn’t convey any precise political directive.  But it’s actually a loosely modified variant of a more common graffiti trope found throughout the Motor City.  Here, on a building at that same intersection as the Addison, is the more common wording.

It clearly says “Vote NCP”.  And the tag shows up all over the place.  Again, the meaning isn’t necessarily clear, unless you know what the acronym NCP stands for.  And most people, it seems, do not.  It was a mystery when I arrived in Detroit last summer; it took some real detective work to draw any conclusions.  The most thoughtful discussion came from a DetroitYES! forum, where a number of participants offered their ideas.  One of the most likely contenders is the New Century Party, a PAC run on the west side, but its hard to reconcile this recent and short-lived organization with the general observation that these scribblings have been around for awhile.  And why wouldn’t a registered political organization choose a more legitimate (and legal) way to promote its cause?

Thus, the word on the information superhighway is that NCP stands for “No Colored People”—about as overtly racist of a statement as one can expect to see, except, of course, that it isn’t particularly overt at all.  Anything less ambiguous would probably attract local media attention, but this branding has never amounted to much of anything, despite the fact that it’s everywhere in downtown and Midtown: buildings, awnings, trashcans, billboards.  The general penmanship is always the same, so a graphologist might be able to determine if it all belongs to the same person: a solitary, cowardly, anonymous provocateur.  I can vouch from experience that, until recently, the tag on the Addison building said “Vote NCP” like all the others. A closer look at the lettering shows how someone else has modified what used to be the letter C into an O, filled the void with a sad face, then added an E to the bottom.

So it appears another vandal has attempted to douse the fire by undermining the implicit racial hostility of the original message.  “VOTE NOPE” conveys apathy at the very least—far more preferable than racism.

But that’s not all: another clown made a separate contribution to this aesthetically challenged palimpsest.  In faint green ink, just above the “N” from “NOPE” is another letter.

It’s a “K”, spelling “KNOPE”, or “VOTE KNOPE” in totality—an obvious hat-tip to Leslie Knope from NBC’s Parks and Recreation, a show whose devoted, cult-like fan base (and this cult’s ability to extract memes from the show’s script and characters) has helped it overcome lackluster Nielsen ratings.  It doesn’t seem that our crusading anti-racist gigglefritzes made it too far though; virtually all of the other “VOTE NCP” tags downtown have retained the vitriol of the original message.

Whether 30 feet tall on a water tower or 18 inches near a storefront window, graffiti’s intrinsic deviant and anti-establishment nature effectively smashes through any constraints imposed by artistic license.  It involves unsanctioned self-expression that doesn’t violate the First Amendment because of the disregard to private property embedded in the expressive act.  Beyond the commission of a property crime, the only true boundaries to graffiti artists are an individual’s creative limitations and the laws of physics.  Because a vandal cannot litigate if someone else defaces his or her art, anything is fair game.  Thus, in terms of intellectual property, the hastily scribbled rants on a public restroom stall are semantically no more or less powerful than a lovingly-conceived fist of solidarity, or a cryptically racist chant that achieves visibility through its ubiquity.  Virtually any provocative message on men’s room walls will eventually elicit an equally inflammatory anonymous response directly below it.  The “VOTE KNOPE” and “sign of the horn” involve the same ethos as the tit-for-tat near the gas station toilet, only the respondents have more time on their hands, a lot more ink, or much less fear of getting caught.  But then, can’t we say the same about even the most widely admired graffiti?

Separate the ersatz and collect up all the cream.

While the interplay between the built and natural environments occupies the bulk of my ruminations, every now and then I can’t help but indulge myself.  And I step fully into the world of pure imagination.  The aisles of a Meijer discount hypermarket store might not be exactly what Roald Dahl had in mind through his chocolate factory (or Leslie Bricusse), but it’s just about as fabricated as a movie set... 

…and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  For those who live in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois or Kentucky, Meijer is as much a part of the shopping landscape as Walmart.  It’s a fierce competitor in these five states, and I have no doubt it continues to frustrate the executives in Bentonville, Arkansas—my suspicion is that Walmart’s market share in this part of the country is lower than it otherwise would be, thanks to this modest chain that germinated just outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan exactly 80 years ago, making it nearly 30 years older than the world’s largest retailer.  But how did Meijer remain confidently ensconced in its Midwestern niche when Walmart dethroned so many others?  (Ames, Pharmor, and Venture went the way of passenger pigeon well over a decade ago, even if some telltale labelscars remain.)

I could expound on how Meijer has effectively cramped Walmart’s style for a few decades now, all while refusing ever to go public.  It avoids far-flung locations like its home state’s Upper Peninsula, no doubt saving it a fortune in logistical costs.  It expands its territory slowly, preferring to densify within its five signature states for the time being; rumors of an inaugural location in Wisconsin have yet to materialize.  It has attempted to broaden its scope through standalone discount department stores (without the groceries), pharmacies, warehouse clubs (like Sam’s Club), and specialty clothing.  None of these concepts proved fruitful, so the home office closed them within a few years.  Yet it continues to flourish in that cluster of great lakes states (and Kentucky).  Last year, Meijer opted to open a store in the Detroit city limits, seen in the photo above--a breakthrough of sorts, since many other major retailers (including the goliath from Arkansas) have shunned the Motor City.  These conservative strategies may have helped Meijer survive the competition that Walmart decimated, but I’d like to think another tactic has helped give the regional chain its edge.

Virtually every Meijer that I’ve seen has an entire row in its well-maintained grocery devoted to ethnic foods.  The specific location often dictates exactly what options it sells, but regardless of the offerings, most evidence suggests that the company has done its research.  Rarely will you see Walmart accommodate an ethnic group (such as Amish buggy parking in Northern Indiana). But online forums like British Expats routinely refer to Meijer—not Walmart—as the go-to for hard-to-find European goodies, and most locations have at least a small but well-stocked British shelves, including the one in the Detroit suburb of Allen Park featured above.  This particular location, with a trade area that includes sizable Mexican, Polish, and Arab populations, not surprisingly offers generous Latino, Eastern European and Middle Eastern sections.  It also distinguishes the Indian subcontinent from the rest of Asia.

But what really caught my attention was the adjective before these regional references.

We see “authentic Italian” followed by “pasta”.  Does this imply that the pasta section, for whatever reason, is otherwise inauthentic?  Or is it pasta from other countries?  Meijer also splits hairs on the other side of the aisle, providing its customers with “authentic Mexican”—

and “Mexican” without the authenticity.

Tex-Mex.  Or American Mexican.  A taqueria versus Taco Bell.  Various studies have shown three ethnic cuisines in the United States consistently vie for the title of most popular—and, not surprisingly, the most ubiquitous.  While the US has more Chinese restaurants than McDonald’s, Italian cuisine has long rated most highly.  But the surge of Mexicans and the cultural influence have elicited a concomitant increase in the popularity of cuisine from south of the border.  Virtually all ethnicities, however, can claim a rise in the popularity of their cuisines.  Thirty years ago, Thai and Indian restaurants were relatively rare outside of the biggest metro areas; now they are fairly easy to find in a small city of 50,000.

The inevitable result of this?  We see more Americanized knock-offs, as well as Meijer’s need to distinguish between the “authentic” (often imported) and the bastardized.  No doubt in another decade, with the ascendancy of falafel, hummus, and shawarma, Middle Eastern cuisine will approach mainstream status, just as it already has in Metro Detroit, home of one of the largest Arab populations outside of ethnically Arab countries.  We already have hummus flavors that would constitute blasphemy in many parts of the world, adulterated to meet mainstream American tastes.  The “authentic” partition in the grocery aisle will soon envelop new nations, impelling greater need to distinguish idiosyncratic, ethnically precise merchandise from its vanilla counterparts…and another opportunity for Meijer to capitalize on something it already does well.

Retrograde retail: there’s weakness in numbers.

Some businesses just fail to quit, though it’s not necessarily from lack of trying.

And if all the negatives in that sentence dilute the denotation, that might be the whole point…at least when the businesses in question are former retail leviathans like Kmart and Sears.

I’ve written about both chains many times in the past on this blog, but little to nothing since 2010 or so.  Truthfully, neither has changed much.  The two brand names, formerly separate companies but merged since 2005, continue to hobble along, shedding a few of the most underperforming stores each quarter, while even the ones that linger still leave onlookers scratching their heads.  How do these retailers—now essentially one company called Sears Holdings Corporation—manage to stay in business?

To a certain extent, they employ the Star Trek mantra: going where no man has gone before…or, to be frank, where no one else is willing to go anymore.  So they aren’t exactly doing it boldly.  Kmart’s approach (which I blogged about four years ago) frequently involves lingering in early automobile-oriented suburban areas that peaked in the late 1950s—the point in time when Kmart was still a juggernaut for discount shopping.  However, these aging suburbs, which typically offered the coveted homeownership ideal to an emergent middle class within a car-dependent milieu, are no longer so savory.  Check out the surviving few Kmarts in Indianapolis, from the blog post above.  Generally speaking, these areas have declined enough economically that the robust Walmart won’t touch them.  In Kansas City, the formerly thriving Bannister Mall area began to tank in the 1990s; today, it represents one of the largest expanses of blighted suburban retail I have ever seen anywhere, featured in this prominent post.  But, as of the fall of 2012, the Kmart at Bannister survives…pretty much the only well-known sign amid the retail wreckage.  (Well, that and the notorious Burlington Coat Factory, but that’s another story.)

Then there’s Sears, whose brand image isn’t quite as weak these days as Kmart, mainly because it still clings to its aggressively middlebrow origins, a contrast from the always low-budget offerings at Kmart.  (Though Kmart has managed the more effective viral commercials in recent years.)  The department store remains a staple at most middle-class malls.  But enclosed shopping malls ain’t what they used to be, for the most part, and if a mall is starting to show weakness in the form of diminishing occupancy levels, it’s often safe to guess which area will get hit the hardest.  That’s right—the Sears wing.  I blogged about it awhile ago, at the primarily successful Castleton Square Mall in Indianapolis, where vacancy was low throughout this super-regional shopping hub…except for the hallway leading to the Sears.

Meanwhile, Cortana Mall in Baton Rouge took the ailing Sears corridor to a whole new level.  My first trip to Cortana in December 2005 confronted me generally busy shopping center, even though locals had longed viewed Cortana as the “other mall” in Baton Rouge, at least since Mall of Louisiana opened in 1997 in a more affluent part of town.  In 2005, most of Cortana flourished (perhaps due to the holidays), except for the hallway leading to Sears, which was overwhelmingly populated with local, mom-and-pop tenants…the type that pervade a struggling mall.  Jump ahead to April 2010—the time of my blog article—and Cortana was peppered with vacancies throughout the structure, while the Sears corridor was dead as a doornail.  Pretty much no inline tenants left, except for Sears.  Even in the most vibrant of malls, the Sears wing tends to host the highest concentration of off-name retailers, clearly suggesting that 1) national brand names don’t want to lease space close to Sears, and 2) mall management, desperate to maintain good occupancy rates, must lower the cost of leasing space, consequently attracting retailers who cannot afford the higher costs in the corridors leading to Macy’s or Dillard’s.  Thus, Sears gets the off brands…when it’s lucky.

A recent trip to suburban Detroit revealed another example of an anemic shopping hub anchored by Sears, but this time within a different typology.

 

Sure, it doesn’t really look that different from your typical Sears in a mega-mall.

But it’s a freestanding Sears—formerly a mainstay of American retail but now relatively uncommon.  It is untethered to any larger mall; no other department stores are nearby.  While the standalone Sears might still occasionally splay out along the highway in the purlieus of a small city (under 25,000 people, for example) the one in the photos below is anything but rural.  It’s in Lincoln Park, a blue-collar inner-ring suburb belonging to Detroit’s “Downriver” communities, which is the local term for the extensive concatenation of municipalities that band along the Detroit River as it eventually distends into Lake Erie.  A fully built-out suburb that exploded after World War II, Lincoln Park is also surrounded in almost all directions by other tightly packed suburbs from more or less the same time period.

Freestanding Sears operations made sense in large towns or small cities surrounded by farmland, since those settlements didn’t necessarily have the trade area to support a regional mall.  But Lincoln Park can claim hundreds of thousands of people within a 10-mile radius.  Perhaps, because of this, one could speculate that this particular Sears serves as a more effective anchor than others: not only does it serve a huge trade area, but it isn’t competing with other, more robust department stores like Macy’s.

Such a guess would be wrong.

This is the remaining strip mall attached to the Lincoln Park Sears.  In the first photo, the edge of the Sears portion is partly visible on the far left.

It’s almost completely vacant, with the exception of a Dollar Tree and an outparcel Big Boy restaurant.

Predictably, a shopping plaza such vacancy levels won’t shell out the cost for basic common area maintenance; drivers have to proceed with caution to avoid huge potholes or neglected debris.

Does Sears Holding Company, parent of Sears and Kmart, know something the rest of us don’t?  Both chains are born from major Midwestern urban centers—Sears from the Chicago area, and Kmart from metro Detroit (in Troy, MI, just 25 miles northeast of Lincoln Park) but customers in their home states aren’t showing any greater loyalty to their brands than they are anywhere else.  The business expansion practices that impelled these brands to stretch from coast to coast may very well be doing them in; most Midwesterners don’t even know the brands came from their part of the country.  Compare this to southern department stores Dillard’s and Belk, which are still mainstays south of the Mason-Dixon and have ever so slightly begun to expand, though never to the ubiquity of the two former titans above.

I will be amazed if this Lincoln Park Sears is still operating two years from now.  Beyond that, I see only two other plausible courses of action: the company sheds virtually all of its locations outside the Midwest and concentrates its energy by reinvigorating loyalty in its region of origin (which happens a lot with restaurant chains); or, it folds altogether as a brick-and-mortar entity and becomes an online wraith, akin to the formerly pre-eminent but now essentially defunct Montgomery Wards (as Wards.com) and Service Merchandise.  It’s not exactly boldly going anywhere, but the cybermarket offers the best chance scoping fertile pastures when finicky customers reject all but the choicest grapes on the vineyard.