In the past, local shopping streets have always been epicenters of every neighborhood. It was where people went for their everyday needs and it was where people socialized, whether it was just a good morning to an acquaintance met in a local cafe or talking about the weekly gossip with a friend while browsing over the fruit at a grocery store. Shopping streets were not just places where people ran their errands and went home. Local shopping streets “bring together in one compact physical space the networks of social, economic, and cultural exchange created every day by store owners, their employees, shoppers, and local residents” (Zukin, page 4). They are usually safe places where people can interact and feel at home with the people of their neighborhood and are not excluding of outsiders. It’s also usually eco-friendly, with shops being close to residents’ homes and allowing them to walk or bike through the market place and carry their bags home.
The types of stores on local shopping streets usually indicates the class of people that live in the area. Working class neighborhoods usually has small immigrant-owned shops with bright displays and affordable merchandise at low prices to cater to the people who live there while higher end neighborhoods will have more upscale and trendy stores with merchandise of higher prices that entices the more affluent. Changing storefronts is usually a good indicator of gentrification.
Change on local shopping streets is almost always inevitable. Local shopping streets can go through the process of ethnic succession. When a group of one ethnicity starts moving out of a neighborhood, they take their goods with them, leaving the space to the new group of a certain ethnicity that moves in after them, just as the Russian and Eastern European Jews did when the earlier German immigrants moved out of the neighborhood in the Lower East Side. A new ethnic group moving into a neighborhood with stores that represent their ethnicity can also push out a different ethnic group. However, just as you’ve mention in your book, Professor Zukin, sometimes, rarely but sometimes, neighborhoods retain their ethnicity and their charm, such as New York’s Little Italy and Chinatown.
In a similar process, local shopping streets can change through gentrification. As more upscale stores open in a neighborhood, more affluent people are attracted to the area, thus allowing the rents to rise and forcing small shopkeepers to close their stores because they cannot afford to pay the rent to keep their stores open anymore. These shopkeepers have to move their businesses to a different neighborhood with lower rent prices while more upscale stores move into the neighborhood, making the neighborhood more upscale and allowing gentrification to continue.
Just as Professor Zukin wrote in her book, Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, the stability of the local shopping streets depends on the supply chains that bring merchandise to the stores, the demographics of the neighborhood, laws and policies of the state, and media image contributing to a street’s “brand”. A disruption in any one of these can lead to store closings and new store openings, thus changing the local shopping streets. Technological innovation such as online commerce and retail chains has a major impact in all of these aspects. Although there can be some benefits to shopkeepers such as good online reviews bringing in new customers and using technology to manage their inventory, technological innovation has many downsides for small shopkeepers. The ability of resident’s to get all their needs online diminishes the need for many neighborhood stores. Instead of walking over to get a newspaper from a corner newsstand, people can get the news online in their own homes. With huge online clothing retailers, people don’t need to go to clothing stores and can have clothes shipped to their doors. Some grocery stores allow you to order online or call in an order for groceries and have it delivered to your door without even having to leave your house. People don’t have to get their needs locally anymore either. You can order what you want from overseas online and have it shipped to you in a couple of days. One of the benefits of people going to local shopping streets is that the money stays in city. However, with all of this technological innovation, money is leaving the country and going elsewhere to different countries supplying the merchandise. This is a big problem for America that gets a lot of its merchandise from industrial countries like China.
Overall, online retailers who work out of huge warehouses of merchandise can really have negative effects on local shopping centers, especially small mom-and-pop stores. In this day and age, people are having less human interaction and more screen-time. I think that many retailers may have to start moving some of their business online if they want to keep up with the fast-moving, tech-based generation. Those memories of going to a familiar shopping street and feeling at home with shoppers and shopkeepers who know their customers by face if not by name may become just that: memories, a thing of the past.
