Fear and loathing in the big box

It's a bad day in the Brooke household when we have to shop at a big box store.
It's enough to make me grimace at people I know and like and try to avoid them.
Shopping at these places produce residual feelings of guilt and resignation to the retail behemoths that continues a good while after I walk out of the silvery pneumatic doors.
Resistance to the “bargains” is futile!
Such a dark day came not too long ago, when a printer cartridge became essential to address envelopes to send out wedding invitations.
A printer cartridge is not something you can typically find in a rural general store.
Desperate measures were attempted: Trying to borrow and swap out printers didn't work. Necessary software no longer exists or wouldn't work once downloaded. The cartridges themselves were incompatible with each other. Other people couldn't get the envelopes printed, either.
I definitely did what I could think of that weekend to try to bypass the experience of driving up to that huge expanse of asphalt, making the long trek from the Cavalier to the personal computing supplies or whatever you call them, dodging highly motivated shoppers armed with fully loaded speeding buggies and grudgingly standing in line to give the world's wealthiest retailer my money for the first time in years.
It's not lost on me that this is a minority position.
That megastore was mega-crammed that day with customers, adding to my discomfort and my sense of frustration about supporting, or not, local businesses.
Admittedly, I'm not much of a shopper and my “crib” has a serious lack of what the kids these days refer to as “bling.”
I do agree with a saying that I heard second hand, however, when it comes to shopping for general household goods in Carroll County: "If you can't get it at Sunnyside, you don't need it."
Given the shift towards “discount” shopping, most locally owned businesses in Hillsville and Carroll County now tend towards services, i.e. lawyers, hair salons, accountants, real estate, food and whatnot, to find their niche.
But there are some savvy entrepreneurs around here that have been able to resist the sucking of all disposable income out of a community by chain stores, all credit to them.
A newspaper from a neighboring locality once acknowledged this by featuring places like Sunnyside and the Hillsville Family Shoe Store and Harmon’s, a few examples of a disappearing retail breed, in an article encouraging readers to take a day shopping trip to Carroll County, that the visit would be worth their while.
And from what I understand, a bunch of people took the recommendation to heart and they made a shopping pilgrimage to the Hillsville area.
I imagine they found it like a retail trip back in time to an era when customer service was key and the wooden floors creak and the aisles are narrow and there’s no laser barcode scanner at the register.
Local businesses continue to face challenges, but organizations like Greater Hillsville Civic Association and the chambers of commerce are trying to find ways to market our merchants and other attractions and keep our economy strong.
If I had my way, I'd take the day-shopping-trip idea and build on it by making a driving tour to stores of interest in Carroll County.
The fresh fruit of Produce Alley in Cana and the Southwest Virginia Farmers' Market, antique stores, arts and crafts galleries, music venues, gift shops, general stores, clothing and more would be featured on thematic maps with highlighted routes popping up from a Web site with the goal of pulling in more visitors to spend money from near and far.
If I had the skills to build an interactive site with clickable store descriptions, photo galleries, maps and driving directions and links, I'd do it myself.
I'll have to settle for doing my part by buying what I can from the stores just down the street from me.
If even a tenth of all those people I saw that day in the impersonal big box would do the same, Main Street would thrive again, I expect.
When I walk into a place like Sunnyside, I don’t feel like an insignificant speck engulfed in racks of cheap clothes, Cheese Whip, Tickle Me Elmos and flat screen TVs.
Chances are I can look over and see the management/owner at work.
While I might leave with an armload of whatever I came in for, I also did something else — I made a kind of investment in my community.
And that makes for a happy day.