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# Shoppers are dropping
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/shoppers-are-dropping/
- Published: 2008-07-22T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T20:16:06.000Z
- Author: David Pisarra
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import

Editor’s note: This is the first part of a two part series on the economy and consumerism.

I LOVE TO SHOP. I DON’T NEED TO BUY because I’m a guy who’ll wander around a mall, a store, or a district, and just look. Partly it’s because I love to imagine how things are made, and sometimes, why. The type of store isn’t all that important, whether it’s a fishing tackle shop, Home Depot, Sur La Table or Macy’s.

There’s a lot of stuff in this world to look at, and think “Do I really need that? Does ANYBODY?” Some of the things that are manufactured, distributed and sold are just absurd.

Sunday I was killing an hour so I wandered through the Linens N Things (LNT) over on Sawtelle. Among the shelves of towels and sheets, there are also electric hot chocolate dispensers, electric home scent warmers, and plastic holders for the plastic French Fry slicer. There are specialized peelers for fruits and ones for vegetables. Special knives for cutting lettuce, and the ever popular S’More’s home grill kit.

The range of goods and the lack of practical use for most of them explained to me why this entire chain of stores, which specializes in homewares, is in a corporate reorganization, commonly called Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

As a consequence of their bankruptcy, many of their 500 stores are being closed. While I was wandering the aisles of various questionably useful goods, it really is no wonder why some companies are doing well in this current economic downturn, and others are in death throes.

As I finished my tour of the LNT, and having absolutely no need for a home cotton candy spinner, even with the 30 percent discount, I decided to wander to the new Sport Chalet, which took over the space that was Bed, Bath and Beyond, after they moved across the street to their new purpose built store. Cruising through a sports store to see the wide selection of toys that I didn’t have as a child, was another exercise in “what were they thinking?”

When I was a lad, my brother used to take me water-skiing. There was always an inner-tube from some truck that was pulled behind the boat, and you rode the inner-tube. Great fun, for not much money. Today you can buy specially designed surf-riders, that come in cool colors, have handles and are made in third world countries. The selection of water toys is immense, skim-boards, surfboards, and boogie boards are all huge industries, catering to the fickle youth market.

This variety of accessories is on the one hand a wonderful thing, and on the other, it is precisely this type of variety and blind consumer spending that has partially led to the slow down in our economy. We just have too much stuff. From our bloated real estate market to our gadget happy consumerism, we have overbuilt.

Do we really need to have two home-ware stores, a Bed, Bath and Beyond, and a Linens and Things, that are barely a dozen blocks apart? They sell the same products, have almost the identical pricing and their clientele is the same. No wonder that one of them suffered so miserably that it needs to be closed.

These are interesting times that we live in, essentially they are analogous to the early ‘30s when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected, it’s good news for the Democrats, and for those who are in industries that are able to reconfigure themselves and weather this financial storm. This is good news for entertainment companies, repo companies and those few individuals who hoarded their cash for this rainy day. They will all have opportunities.

It’s a scary time for a great many people, the employees who lost their jobs when the LNT finally closes are not likely to replace that income easily. We have a growing class of unemployed people, and an infrastructure that is in dire need of attention. Which is why we should be on the lookout for a series of public works that resembles the New Deal projects of FDR.

As a diehard capitalist, I know it sounds very socialist of me, but I have solid reasons why this is a good use of our capital and a few ideas on what to do with it all. I’ll be fleshing them out more in next week’s column.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 22, 2008.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/072208.pdf?ref=smdp.com)