There's no shops in town

Like a lot of places around the world, my home city of Auckland has a main street that is dying, and there are no end of opinions about what's causing it. It's the Covid, or the lack of space for cars, or too many cars, or just no vibe. I say it's simpler than that - all the interesting shops just went away.

I never gave a damn about public art displays or parades or gourmet dining experiences - the town centre was always just the place to buy cool shit.

When I was a kid, growing up in a town of a few thousand people, going to the big city was a huge fucking deal. If you could get into the middle of town, there would be so many weird bookshops and record sellers. Magic shops that sold tricks you'd never seen before and stores that sold nothing but old movie posters or horror novels or groovy tee-shirts. The best video arcades. That's where you got the kind of cool shit nobody else in your small town could get.

After weeks or months or years of being stuck in a cultural backwater, any visit to the big city required some kind of meticulous planning, because there was so much to get to, and my parents would let me roam free from a disturbingly young age. They never quite realised why some shops you could walk in and out of in 300 seconds, while other might have such good stuff they need two hours of attention, and would just let me do my thing.

I'd have to work out how to get to the best bookshops, and which ones had the best chance of getting some proper American comics. It would take hours and hours to go from place to place, and any money I'd scraped together had to be carefully measured out - do I want the GI Joes or the Alpha Flight comics from that second hand place? Do I go for the Time Twister or the James Bond hardback at the place that sold remaindered books for dead cheap? (I went for the Time Twister and never regretted it.)

Everything ever made is available to us all the time now, but that kind of centre city experience is long gone, because all those weird shops are gone now. Corporate town centres lead to corporate rents and all the interesting shit inevitably fades away. Landlords get in the big retail clients with the big moneys, but they're just selling the same crap you can get at your local mall, so there's nothing special about going into town.

And sure, you can get anything through the internet, but really not the same as stumbling across something interesting in a random place, as putting in some effort for the reward.

There's still the odd good shop around in the weird corners of the big city, but it's the same old shit for most of the time, usually devoted to the modern cult of narcissism - there hasn't been an actual book shop on Auckland's Queen Street in years.

All I can hope for is a collapse in market rents, and all the landlords who have been creaming it on capital gains will be forced to drop the huge demands that push out anything with tiny margins. Or just burn it all down and start again, because there's nothing fun in this town anymore.