Editorials

Well, whoop-de-do. Target Berkeley! A flurry of press releases in my inbox, plus an article in the trade press and another in a Berkeley local online outlet reveal that the city’s downtown will be honored with some sort of a brand-new mini-Target incarnation: same iconic bulls-eye logo, the whole megillah, just downsized a bit.

The commentariat is wowed. The most prolific local email annunciator, someone whose name seems to be “guest”, was the first up to the plate online: “Great news. Well done, Mr. Caplan. And thanks to the DBA for its efforts to make the downtown a more desirable place to eat, shop and play. More work to do, for certain, but this is a good step in the right direction.”

I guess I’d be wowed too, if I wasn’t cursed with remembering a whole string of similar first steps that never made it to step two. When we were incubating our software company in the early 80s, upstairs in the charming Telegraph Avenue building which is now Rasputin’s, the landlord and downstairs neighbor was Miller’s Outpost, a Southern California clothing chain (do they still exist?) and up the street was The Gap—both now gone.

And downtown: I was part of a big (losing) fight by preservationists to stop the hideous remodel of the building that housed beloved Edy’s ice cream parlor in order to attract the Eddie Bauer chain. Uh-huh. Came and went in jig time. Now we have, what, a cellphone store, in that plug-ugly building? I can’t even remember, because I never shop in downtown Berkeley any more. 

OMG! Can I admit it in print? When I need laundry soap, toilet paper, shoes, and a few other items formerly found downtown, I’ve been known to DRIVE to Target in Emeryville, after first of course checking online to see what kinds of paper products are NOT made by the Koch brothers. So in theory having a teeny Tarjhay, as we in the cognoscenti pronounce it, might be handy. Except that no one in my household is young or nimble enough to schlep huge packages of TP and detergent home on foot, bicycle or even on the bus. But if you are, Target Express might be just what you need. 

Not, of course, that all of those things aren’t already available downtown at semi-competitive prices at Walgreen’s or CVS, despite the best efforts of the PCish crowd to keep them out. (Don't get me wrong. Some of my best friends are…PC.) 

What these fine folks are not recognizing, when they point out the vanishingly small number of independent pharmacies still around, is that all retail is converging, morphing into general stores of varying sizes. Safeway is metastasizing on the corner of College and Claremont, having already bought out and replaced the independent Chimes pharmacy. The florist across College has gone under: Safeway’s new strip mall will have one instead. And so it goes. You can pick up a quart of milk at Walgreen’s anywhere. 

Some suggest boycotting Safeway’s new store, but I never went to the old one, preferring the local independent market which recently had its front window smashed by animal rights activists because it carried a sign advertising meat. Really, it’s a miracle anyone wants to run a small retail store in Berkeley anymore. 

And speaking of boycotts, you might just type “boycott Target” into your search engine.  

Just a sample: In 2010 Berkeley’s own MoveOn was recommending such a thing because, as I remember, Target corporate in Minnesota contributed big bucks to an anti-gay-marriage Republican candidate for Governor. And there’s more, too tedious to recount. If memory serves, Target is now backpedalling on such stances. In any event, I still go there—I can barely keep up with what the Koch Brothers are up to, much less Target. 

(I’ll admit I’m still not able to stomach that fancy downtown restaurant whose proprietor is on record endorsing the last anti-homeless ballot measure and opposing the minimum wage law. But she’s no worse than many of her peers.) 

The truth is that both local stores and malls are now in big trouble because of the Internet. Barnes and Noble came and went on Berkeley’s commercial streets, but so did Cody’s Books. 

Many people seem to prefer shopping from home, and bricks-and-mortar is losing out. One touted feature of the new Tarjhay Express is that it will offer a service that lets you order online from home and pick up in the store. Walgreen’s, of course, already does that—we get good deals on vitamins and cheap shampoo that way.  

But there’s not much really new under the sun, is there? When my kids were little and we lived in the Midwest on a miniscule grad student budget, the Sears catalog offered the same service. Socks, Toughskin jeans, tee shirts, toys…anything we needed could be ordered by snail mail or from pleasant ladies on the phone, at fair prices, delivered to a storefront downtown for pickup or to our door for a few dollars more.  

So you’ll excuse me if I don’t join the general chorus of huzzahs every time another chain dips its corporate toes into Berkeley waters. I guess I’ve just been around this particular block too many times to believe the PR—and I’ll probably continue getting my Tide and TP in Emeryville because it’s impossible to park in downtown Berkeley.  

(Oops, I wasn’t supposed to say that, was I?)