Arizona – 21 June

The strip malls, parking lots and fast food franchises spread for miles. Tarmac stretches from horizon to horizon, crisscrossed with pickup trucks and SUVs.

I am not sure where the people come from to support this level of retail redundancy. There are no houses in this part of town, but every corner sports a cookie-cutter burger joint. Every block, a pharmacy or a supermarket. This strip mall alone sports three shoe stores (or warehouses, or “factories”), and there is another strip mall just like it across the way. Maybe this is zoning efficiency, rather than madness? Maybe.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011 at 12:00 am and is filed under Travel. You can feed this entry. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses

  1. Um, maybe.

    Sounds like you landed in a Douglas Coupland novel. Glad you moved on quickly.

    I recently drove through Logan and was shocked when at one point I looked up at a traffic light to see strip malls lining the road ahead, with every major take-away chain on a 500m strip. Hideous.

    Clare G - June 28th, 2011 at 2:08 pm

  2. My thought was that I had landed in the backstory for Snow Crash. Not hard to see things here making the leap to burbclaves and franchulates in the next 10-15 years.

    Zane - June 29th, 2011 at 11:25 pm

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